An increasing number of families around the world are now living apart from one another, subsequently causing the defining and redefining of their relationships, roles within the family unit, and how to effectively maintain a sense of familial cohesion through distance.
Edited by Maria Rosario T. de Guzman, Jill Brown, and Carolyn Pope Edwards, Parenting From Afar and the Reconfiguration of Family Across Distance uniquely highlights how families--both in times of crisis and within normative cultural practices--organize and configure themselves and their parenting through physical separation. In this volume, readers are given a unique look into the lives of families around the world that are affected by separation due to a wide range of circumstances including economic migration, fosterage, divorce, military deployment, education, and orphanhood. Contributing authors from the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, education, and geography all delve deep into the daily realities of these families and share insight on why they live apart from one another, how families are redefined across long distances, and the impact absence has on various members within the unit.
An especially timely volume, Parenting From Afar and the Reconfiguration of Family Across Distance offers readers an important understanding and examination of family life in response to social change and shifts in the caregiving context.
Industry Reviews
"[In this book] The editors and contributors challenge mainstream parenting and child development scholars by drawing attention to non-typical parenting conditions that impact millions of children worldwide. Cutting across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, each chapter systematically tells stories and presents data of children raised by parents from afar in diverse family structures. Contributors tackle distinct parenting-from-afar conditions, ranging from
incarcerated parents to military and refugee families to immigrant families, all in a well-balanced and appropriately-sensitive manner. This powerful volume is a must-read, pioneering compendium for
scientists, practitioners, educators, interventionists, and policy makers."
-- Gustavo Carlo, Millsap Professor of Diversity and Multicultural Studies and Co-Director, Center for Children and Families Across Cultures, University of Missouri
"In Parenting from Afar, international scholars describe the diversity of family arrangements across physical distances, expanding our views of traditional family life, roles, and coping, as well as questioning norms and beliefs about parenting, child rearing, kinship, and the 'normal family.' Each fascinating chapter identifies the centrality of the ecocultural context for understanding family, challenging established developmental theories and
setting the stage for future research that must address such diversity."
-- Deborah Best, William L. Poteat Professor of Psychology, Wake Forest University
"What these editors do so well is provide convincing evidence that families that are close-knit while living far apart are not only found in the 'majority world' but also exist, albeit largely ignored in the scholarly literature, across the Western Educated Industrialized Rich and democratic world. This book should be required reading for all who study 'the family.'"
-- Jonathan Tudge, Professor of Human Development and Family Studies, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
