错位婚姻家庭中小孩抚养和婆媳冲突研究——以广州“80后”青年白领为例

都市社会80后青年人群中,来自农村的凤凰男和出身城市的孔雀女所组建的错位婚姻家庭越来越普遍,网络上、电视电影上和现实生活中弥漫着大量关于凤凰男和孔雀女家庭的矛盾和冲突,其中尤以围绕小孩抚养产生的婆媳冲突最为激烈。文章分析了凤凰男和孔雀女家庭中农村婆婆和城市媳妇在小孩抚养过程中出现的小孩定位、消费理念、生活方式、代际资源、性别角色和家务劳动分配这五种冲突类型及其影响机制。错位婚姻家庭中的婆媳冲突表面上是日常生活中的家庭矛盾,实质上却是农村青年精英向上流入都市社会之后无法摆脱出身农村家庭低社会地位的先赋性因素制约而面临的结构性弱势。这种结构性弱势在转型时期国家和市场的双重形塑下体现了凤凰男自致性个体社会地位和先赋性家庭社会地位之间的张力,同时也决定了错位婚姻家庭中婆媳冲突必将长期存在。     

‘It’s an invisible wound’: the disenfranchised grief of post-separation mothers who lose care time

This paper enriches understandings of the implications of contemporary custody law for mothers and their children. It does so through a discussion of mothers’ grief and emotional pain over involuntarily losing care time with children. Mothers involuntarily lose care time by becoming non-resident parents against their will or by having a shared care parenting order imposed on them. Both experiences of losing maternal care time are becoming more commonplace as a result of the gender neutrality of custody laws across the Anglo-West and the increased emphasis given to shared care parenting as a viable post-separation parenting arrangement. Yet investigations into the emotions engendered by mothers’ loss of care time are sparse. Exploratory qualitative research with twelve mothers who involuntarily lost care time reveals the intensity and durability of their grief, its entanglement with emotions like fear, and its significance, as a relational welfare approach emphasises, to children’s best interests.     

Cross-Informant Ratings of the Emotional and Behavioral Functioning of College Students

One hundred seventy-four college students and a subset of their mothers and fathers provided ratings of college students’ emotional and behavioral functioning. College students and their mothers and fathers demonstrated variable levels of correspondence in their ratings of college students’ internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. Similar findings were noted with t-test comparisons, with college students rating themselves as experiencing significantly higher levels of behavior problems than did their mothers and fathers. Further, college students’ ratings of their mothers’ and fathers’ parenting and their perceptions of their parents predicted significantly their ratings of their own behavior problems. Although mothers’ communication reciprocity and perceptions of their college students served as significant predictors of mothers’ ratings, a different pattern of results occurred with paternal variables. Overall, these findings further the understanding of correspondence and predictors of cross-informant ratings of college students’ emotional and behavioral functioning. Kimberly Renk is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida (UCF) in Orlando, Florida, serving the Department of Psychology’s Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at the University of Illinois, her Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology at Illinois State University, and her Doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology at the University of South Florida after completing a predoctoral internship in Clinical Psychology at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center. Her current interests include parents’ perceptions of their children’s emotional and behavioral functioning and parent-child interactions. She and her graduate students pursue the study of these topics and provide clinical services to the community surrounding UCF through the Understanding Children and Families laboratory. Reesa Donnelly is a Doctoral student at the University of Central Florida. She received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Virginia and her M.S. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Central Florida. Her major research interests include parent-child relationships in the context of cognitive development and health psychology. Jenny Klein is a Doctoral student at the University of Central Florida. She received her B.S. in Psychology from the University of Florida and her M.S. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Central Florida. Her main research interests are in the area of family interactions, parenting, and child emotional and behavioral problems in minority populations. Arazais Oliveros is a Doctoral student at the University of Central Florida. She received her B.A. in psychology from Florida International University and her M.S. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Central Florida. Her major research interests involve the area of children and parenting, especially in families with risk factors for child maltreatment (e.g., marital abuse, medical concerns). Elizabeth Baksh is a Graduate student at the University of Central Florida. She received her B.S. in psychology and religious studies from the University of Miami and her M.S.W. from the University of South Florida. Her major research interests include parent-child relationships in the context of pediatric psychology.     

Pregnant silence: (en)gendering Ireland's asylum space

In the wake of a new ruling on non-EU immigration into Ireland, Lentin makes a theoretical intervention by positing the gendering of Ireland's new migratory spaces via the bodies of asylum-seeking mothers. Employing David Theo Goldberg's concept of the ‘racial state’ and the two traditions of thinking about racial states, naturalism and historicism, she examines the gendered character of racial subjection and the rule of racial subjects in relation to the position of migrant mothers as the reproducers of future generations of Irish citizens. Second, Lentin explores the role of social research in investigating migrant populations. Social researchers and their subjects may have a role in interrupting the order of Irish late modernity, which keeps constructing new classificatory schemata--such as ‘nationals’ versus ‘non-nationals’--that are about the insistence on epistemological order in the face of disorder. She argues that migrant mothers and their ‘Irish-born’ children act to subvert traditional understandings of citizenship and ‘the nation’, dragging Irish modernity kicking and screaming into the chaos of the postmodern. Similarly, reflexive social research may give researchers an opportunity to destabilize ordered sociological narratives about the Other.     

A three-year comparative longitudinal study of a school-based social work family service to reduce truancy,delinquency and school exclusions

New Labour is keen to use legislation to encourage what are seen as desirable family practices, and to discourage other, less-favoured, forms. What this means in policy terms has now been codified in its 1998 Green Paper, Supporting Families . In this paper, we examine the validity of this enterprise in terms of its underlying assumptions about social behaviour and economic decision making. We argue that the government implicitly assumes a universal model of 'rational economic man' and his close relative the 'rational legal subject', whereby people take individualistic, cost-benefit type decisions about how to maximize their own personal gain. Change the financial structure of costs and benefits, and the legal structure of rights and duties, in the appropriate way and people will modify their social behaviour in the desired direction. However, recent research suggests that people do not act like rational economic man in making decisions about their moral economy. Legislation based on this assumption might then be ineffectual and the proposals in Supporting Families seem to be one example. This is what we have labelled the 'rationality mistake'. In Part I of this work, we focus on the financial proposals in the Green Paper and on the New Deal for Lone Parents in particular. We then go on to counterpose this with the results of recent empirical work on how and why people actually do make family decisions. In Part II, to be published in the next issue, we focus on chapter four of Supporting Families , on strengthening marriage, and again compare New Labour's proposals with recent empirical work.     

The Intergenerational Transmission of Physical Punishment: Differing Mechanisms in Mothers’ and Fathers’ Endorsement?

We examined the intergenerational transmission of physical punishment (PP) and whether marital satisfaction moderated this transmission. Participants were 241 mothers and 107 fathers with a three year-old child who completed a semi-structured interview assessing their endorsement of disciplinary methods and the methods their parents used to discipline them. Marital satisfaction was assessed using the Conflicts and Problem Solving Scales. Different predictive models were obtained for mothers and fathers. For mothers, socioeconomic status (SES) and their own mother’s use of PP significantly predicted their current endorsement of PP. For fathers, SES and perceived harshness of childhood discipline predicted current endorsement of PP. Marital satisfaction moderated the intergenerational transmission of PP for fathers, but not mothers. Results indicated that PP by the same-sex parent and SES are important factors in its intergenerational transmission, and that the effects of childhood PP on current endorsement may be more direct for mothers and indirect for fathers.