Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms

Description

Modern Families brings together research on parenting and child development in new family forms including lesbian mother families, gay father families, families headed by single mothers by choice and families created by assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF), egg donation, sperm donation, embryo donation and surrogacy. This research is examined in the context of the issues and concerns that have been raised regarding these families. The findings not only contest popular myths and assumptions about the social and psychological consequences for children of being raised in new family forms but also challenge well-established theories of child development that are founded upon the supremacy of the traditional family. It is argued that the quality of family relationships and the wider social environment are more influential in children's psychological development than are the number, gender, sexual orientation, or biological relatedness of their parents or the method of their conception.

Susan Golombok is Director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge and Professorial Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge.

'This book would be most beneficial to any professional working systemically or for any professional working with more contemporary family form to better understand how that family form works in order to parent well and to be aware of where potential conflicts may arise.' The Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (acamh.org) 'For years, a basic premise was that the more a family deviated from the traditional, two-parent, heterosexual family, the more the child's psychological well-being was in jeopardy. Golombok addresses a more elemental question by asking how the parenting children in new families experience actually differs from that found in traditional families. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals, general readers.' Choice '... Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms reviews the newer research focused on families created through assisted reproductive procedures or lesbian-headed and gay-headed families. The book includes well-written introduction and conclusion chapters and six chapters that review research on various family formations. For readers with a college vocabulary, [Golombok] does an excellent job of describing each study, the results and the limitations. The last chapter does a particularly good job of summarizing the findings and pulling it all together, and it should be required reading for any professionals who work with these families.' PsycCRITIQUES 'Modern Families is a landmark publication, a succinct state-of-the-art review, and is highly relevant reading for researchers in developmental psychology or family studies and for students in these fields. Policymakers, and indeed parents or want-to-be parents of children brought up in de novo or planned lesbian or gay families, will also want to read this rich and inspiring book.' Fiona Tasker and Victor Figueroa, Journal of GLBT Family Studies