Most people agree that every child deserves an equal chance to flourish. Most also value family life. Yet the family plays a surprisingly crucial part in maintaining inequality from one generation to the next. The children of disadvantaged parents typically achieve less and die younger. Early in their school careers, even the most able among them fall behind their better-off peers. They are then 8 times less likely to attend a top university. In the UK, as in other rich countries, the ‘playing-field’ is anything but level. This book explores how seemingly mundane aspects of family life – from the right to inherit income, to the reading of bedtime stories – raise fundamental questions of social justice. Taking fairness seriously, it argues, means rethinking what equality of opportunity means.

Drawing upon perspectives from across the globe and employing an interdisciplinary life course approach, this handbook explores the production and reproduction of different types of inequality across a variety of social contexts. Inequalities are not static, easily measurable, and essentially quantifiable circumstances of life. They are processes which impact on individuals throughout the life course, interacting with each other, accumulating, attenuating, reproducing, or distorting themselves along the way. The chapters in this handbook examine various types of inequality, such as economic, gender, racial, and ethnic inequalities, and analyse how these inequalities manifest themselves within different aspects of society, including health, education, and the family, at multiple levels and dimensions. The handbook also tackles the global COVID-19 pandemic and its striking impact on the production and intensification of inequalities. The interdisciplinary life course approach utilised in this handbook combines quantitative and qualitative methods to bridge the gap between theory and practice and offer strategies and principles for identifying and tackling issues of inequality. This book will be indispensable for students and researchers as well as activists and policy makers interested in understanding and eradicating the processes of production, reproduction, and perpetuation of inequalities.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Single parents face a triple bind of inadequate resources, employment, and policies, which in combination further complicate their lives. This book - multi-disciplinary and comparative in design - shows evidence from over 40 countries, along with detailed case studies of Sweden, Iceland, Scotland, and the UK. It covers aspects of well-being that include poverty, good quality jobs, the middle class, wealth, health, children’s development and performance in school, and reflects on social justice. Leading international scholars challenge our current understanding of what works and draw policy lessons on how to improve the well-being of single parents and their children.

To download an e-inspection copy click here or for more information contact your local sales representative. Now in an updated second edition, Social Inequality continues to be an essential guide to understanding social inequality and stratification, helping readers to understand what inequality is, how it is defined, explored and measured, and what the key social divisions are at both global and national level. The new edition includes: A global context, offering a comparative discussion on social inequalities, policy, and justice. NEW CHAPTER: ′Youth and Age′ discusses age as a social construct and form of division. NEW CHAPTER: ′Health and disability′ defines health inequalities and analyses the current thinkers on health inequalities and their proposed solutions. Updated coverage of sexuality and transgender issues. Enhanced discussion of migration and asylum seeking.

When migrants reach their new home, we often interpret their settlement and integration as an individual process driven largely by the labour market. But family plays a crucial role. Putting Family First is the fruit of a four-year academic–community partnership to investigate the experience of immigrant families settling in Greater Toronto. Contributors explore the integration trajectory of immigrant families, from newcomers’ initial reception to their deep involvement in and attachment to their receiving society. Chapters examine the interrelated themes of the policy environment, children and youth, gender, labour markets and work, and community supports, making insightful connections between concepts such as neoliberalism, resilience, and social capital. Putting Family First applies rigorous academic research to solve practical problems, illustrating how the family context can be mobilized to facilitate the successful integration of newcomers and offering important guidance to practitioners and policy makers in Canada and beyond.

Childhood looms large in our understanding of human life, as a phase through which all adults have passed. Childhood is foundational to the development of selfhood, the formation of interests, values and skills and to the lifespan as a whole. Understanding what it is like to be a child, and what differences childhood makes, are thus essential for any broader understanding of the human condition. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is an outstanding reference source for the key topics, problems and debates in this crucial and exciting field and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into five parts: · Being a child · Childhood and moral status · Parents and children · Children in society · Children and the state. Questions covered include: What is a child? Is childhood a uniquely valuable state, and if so why? Can we generalize about the goods of childhood? What rights do children have, and are they different from adults’ rights? What (if anything) gives people a right to parent? What role, if any, ought biology to play in determining who has the right to parent a particular child? What kind of rights can parents legitimately exercise over their children? What roles do relationships with siblings and friends play in the shaping of childhoods? How should we think about sexuality and disability in childhood, and about racialised children? How should society manage the education of children? How are children’s lives affected by being taken into social care? The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of childhood, political philosophy and ethics as well as those in related disciplines such as education, psychology, sociology, social policy, law, social work, youth work, neuroscience and anthropology.

This book gives students a critical insight into how children and families' everyday lives and experiences are shaped by policy and legislation.

This book contributes to current debates about the importance of early literacy and the different ways that literacy resources offer support to parents with young children. It sheds light on the impact of policy discourse and austerity measures on community resources designed to support children’s early literacy learning. Based on an ethnographic study carried out in a small town in the East Midlands, UK, the book shows how government policy is enacted in four local resources – Sure Start children’s centres, pre-schools, a public library and privately run parent and child early education classes. It reveals how inequalities and contradictions exist in different forms of community literacy provision which can explain some of the educational differences evident when children start school. With a particular focus on mothers, the book reveals how parents are supported differently depending on where they go and how they are viewed by the professionals they encounter. The book contributes to the current literature around literacy in early childhood and combines a unique case study with theoretical concepts to offer a new way of thinking about early intervention, parental engagement and school readiness. Local Literacies in Early Childhood will be highly relevant reading for researchers, academics and post-graduate students in the field of early childhood education and literacy education. It will also be of interest to policymakers, early childhood professionals, literacy advisors and librarians from different local, national and international contexts wishing to support parents and children more equitably so that learning opportunities can be maximised and educational inequalities tackled.

The family is our haven, the place where we all start off on equal footing — or so we like to think. But if that’s the case, why do so many siblings often diverge widely in social status, wealth, and education? In this groundbreaking and meticulously researched book, acclaimed sociologist Dalton Conley shatters our notions of how our childhoods affect us, and why we become who we are. Economic and social inequality among adult siblings is not the exception, Conley asserts, but the norm: over half of all inequality is within families, not between them. And it is each family’s own “pecking order” that helps to foster such disparities. Moving beyond traditionally accepted theories such as birth order or genetics to explain family dynamics, Conley instead draws upon three major studies to explore the impact of larger social forces that shape each family and the individuals within it. From Bill and Roger Clinton to the stories of hundreds of average Americans, here we are introduced to an America where class identity is ever changing and where siblings cannot necessarily follow the same paths. This is a book that will forever alter our idea of family.

This edition brings together specially commissioned reviews of key areas of social policy and considers a range of current issues within the field. The book contains invaluable research, including discussions on modern slavery, childcare and social justice and welfare chauvinism, as well as a chapter centred on the Grenfell Tower fire. Bringing together the insights of a diverse group of experts in social policy, this book examines critical debates in the field in order to offer an informed review of the best in social policy scholarship over the past year. Published in association with the SPA, the volume will be of interest to students and academics in social policy, social welfare and related disciplines.