This book is concerned with the question of how families matter in young people's development - a question of obvious interest and importance to a wide range of readers, which has serious policy implication. A series of key current topics concerning families are examined by the top international scholars in the field, including the key risks affecting children, individual differences in their resilience, links between families and peers, the connections between parental work and children's family lives, the impact of childcare, divorce, and parental separation, grandparents, and new family forms such as lesbian and surrogate mother families. The latest research findings are brought together with discussion of policy issues raised. About the Editors: Judy Dunn is a psychologist whose research is focused on children's social, emotional and communicative development. She has studied children's family relationships (she pioneered research on siblings) and friendships, stepfamilies, and children's understanding of other people with a particular interest in longitudinal naturalistic observation approaches. She began her research in Cambridge University, spent 8 years in the US, and is currently a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. She is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Medical Sciences. She has received the Society for Research in Child Development's Award for Distinuished Scientific Contribution and the American Psychological Association's G. Stanley Hall Award. She has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Van Leer Foundation in Jerusalem, and universities in Italy. She has written scholarly articles and books, including most recently Children's Friendships: The Beginnings of Intimacy (Blackwell Publications 2004). |