Katja Repo - Böcker

This book analyses how turbulence is interwoven into the everyday life of families with children, thus becoming personal and intimate. Chapter authors use empirical data to highlight the contextual and relational nature of both global and local challenges affecting families, discussing complex dynamics across health, work and the environment.Presenting insights based on cutting-edge research, contributing authors examine how diverse disruptions, which often intersect, are lived and experienced by parents and children. They cover important issues including poverty, Covid-19, working life and climate change. Chapters include micro-level explorations, focusing on accounts of turbulence within single country contexts, as well as macro-level analysis, concentrating on cross-country differences where welfare states, work and everyday family life intersect. They investigate how institutional contexts and macro-level changes influence the micro-level within the household.Families with Children in a Turbulent Era is an invaluable resource for students and researchers across a wide range of social sciences, including comparative social policy, education, social psychology, social work and family, gender and labour market studies. It is also a thought-provoking read for professionals and policymakers at the local, national and international level, as well as education and social policy administrators.

This is a first-class repository of new knowledge on how media and family routines intertwine in daily interactions. The multi-method approach reveals how varying forms of media affect the interaction between children and their parents. Avoiding criticism of these interactions, the contributors instead offer an impartial view of the natural occurrences in media-related family life. The first section of the book maps contemporary family life by providing methodological, theoretical and time-use reflections on media use and family communication. It goes on to reach into the private zone of family interaction through video-documented episodes, providing the reader with detailed interactional analyses. This exposes how the boundaries between virtual interaction and face-to-face interaction have become blurred. Offering a comprehensive picture of the complexity of digital family life, this book exposes the challenges and opportunities of modern parenting. Discussing largely unexplored phenomena that are applicable internationally, this book will appeal to a wide range of researchers and students in the fields of social sciences. Professionals such as psychologists, therapists and social workers will also benefit from the impartial insight this work gives into the media's impact on modern family interaction.Contributors include: I. Arminen, S. Danby, A. Kallio, A.R. Lahikainen, T. Mälkiä, E. Mantere, J. Marsh, P. Nikken, S. Raudaskoski, K. Repo, E. Suoninen, S. Tiilikainen, S. Valkonen

This timely book reveals how policies of childcare and early childhood education influence children's circumstances and the daily lives of families with children. Examining how these policies are approached, it focuses particularly on the issues and pitfalls related to equal access.Chapters explore early childhood education and care policies in different social and geographical contexts, highlighting the different ways in which stakeholders - including parents, administrators and policy makers - approach issues of equality. The book further analyses what is meant by, and expected of, early childhood education and care in society and how this varies between nations. Key case studies in the context of liberal, conservative and universal approaches to welfare are used to show the broad differences between them, problematizing the notion of equal access.Social policy, family studies and sociology scholars will appreciate the new insights into the question of the equality of societies offered in this book. It will also prove incisive for researchers looking at the family and early childhood education, as well as for politicians and administrators working in the field.