This ground-breaking book examines how shifting gender relations in successive cohorts interact with pension reforms, raising questions about distributional equity in the context of gendered familial responsibilities. New patterns of pension advantage are emerging, influenced by partnership status, parenthood, class and ethnicity.

This new study uses longitudinal data to provide new insights into the changing dynamics of lives of women today. In particular, it explores the potential of longitudinal or life course analysis as a powerful tool for appreciating the gender dimension of social life.

Throughout Europe, standardised approaches to social policy and practice are being radically questioned and modified. Beginning from the narrative detail of individual lives, this book re-thinks welfare predicaments, emphasising gender, generation, ethnic and class implications of economic and social deregulation.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guangdong, China, this book explores the various tactics queer people employ to have children and to form queer or ‘rainbow’ families. It unpacks people’s experiences of cultivating, or losing, kinship relations through their negotiation with biological relatives, cultural conventions and state legislations.

Shedding light on the challenges and experiences of women and families within the criminal justice system, this book considers issues of intersectionality, violence and gender. Accessible to both academics and practitioners and with real-world policy recommendations, this collection demonstrates how positive change can be achieved.

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.

This book is the first to explore the interactions of the law with the life course in order to understand the complex life journey as a whole. Jonathan Herring reveals how the law privileges “middle age” to the detriment of the whole life story and explains why an understanding of the life course is important for lawyers.

This timely study explores the experiences of fathers who take on equal or primary care responsibilities for young children.

Offering academic insight and practical recommendations, this will be key reading for researchers, policymakers, practitioners and students interested in contemporary families.

This compelling book examines parental leave policies in Nordic countries, looking at how these laws encourage men towards life courses with greater care responsibilities. It considers the impact that these policies have had on gender equality and how they have led to a re-gendering of men by promoting ‘caring masculinities’.

Drawing from forty years of experience, Julia Brannen offers an invaluable account of how research in family studies is conducted and ‘matters’ at particular times. An exceptional resource for family scholars and those interested in the methodology of social research.

This volume provides an international perspective on parental leave policies in different countries, goes beyond this to examine a range of issues in depth, and aims to stimulate thinking about possible futures and how policy might underpin them.

This exciting collection presents an in-depth, up-to-date analysis of the unprecedented phenomenon of increasing numbers of grandparents worldwide, co-existing and interacting for longer periods of time with their grandchildren.