Welfare & benefit systems

Understanding childhood is a fresh look at how childhood has changed in recent years and reveals how children's needs and experiences have achieved a new visibility

This book examines who is likely to have a baby as a teenager, the consequences of early motherhood and how teenage pregnancy is dealt with in the media. The author argues that society's negative attitude to young mothers marginalises an already excluded group and that efforts should be focused on support.

The book offers insights into childhood by focusing on accounts of home and family, school, public spaces and sites of work in local and global settings.

This interdisciplinary textbook examines children's lives across the world, acknowledging the great differences as well as points of comparison, between childhoods in different contexts.

This book presents the perspectives of 22 leading figures involved in shaping the field of Childhood Studies over the last 30 years. They reflect on the changes that have taken place in the study of children and childhood, discuss ideas underpinning the field, examine current dilemmas and explore challenges for the future.

This book examines how pathologising ideas of failing, chaotic and dysfunctional families create a powerful consensus that Britain is in the grip of a ‘parent crisis’ and are used to justify increasingly punitive state policies.

Despite the high aspirations of young people from disadvantaged communities, they face barriers that are frustrating the realisation of their educational ambitions. This book analyses the ‘left-behind’ phenomenon and explains how denied educational equality undermines social cohesion and what we can do about it.

The impacts of austerity and welfare reform on work and employment relations are explored in this perceptive assessment. This book highlights the role of trade unions and social movements in challenging the insecurities and inequalities imposed by work-focused welfare policies such as Universal Credit and proposes progressive new paths for welfare.

Drawing on international case studies from emerging economies and developing countries including South Africa, India, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Tunisia, Indonesia, China and Russia, this book examines the rise, nature and effectiveness of recent developments in social policy in the Global South.

Drawing on interviews with key international informants across 16 countries, this book examines how child support systems often fail to transfer payments from separated fathers to mothers and their children. It identifies how the gender order is entrenched through child support failure and offers possibilities for feminist reform.

Harry Hendrick shows how broader social changes, including neoliberalism, feminism, the collapse of the social-democratic ideal, and the 'new behaviourism', have led to the rise of the anxious and narcissistic parent, In this provocative history of parenting.

The central interest of this innovative book is the role and significance of family in a context of poverty and low-income. Based on a micro-level study carried out in 2011 and 2012 with 51 families in Northern Ireland, it offers new empirical evidence and a theorisation of the relationship between family life and poverty.