A missing child is the ultimate nightmare for parents of every nation—a nightmare imprinted on parents' consciousness by widely publicized abductions in the late twenty and early twenty-first centuries. However, missing persons rarely become the victims of foul play, because although missing-person cases are reported in record numbers, these cases have also been resolved in record nu…
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was established in 1830. By the year 2000, there were more than 11 million church members, who are commonly referred to as Latter-day Saints (LDS) or Mormons. International expansion of the church has been significant since 1960 when 90 percent of the membership lived in the United States. In 1999, only 12 percent of Latter-day Saints lived in Utah, …
Contemporary mothering and motherhood are viewed from a much broader perspective than in previous decades by emphasizing the relational and logistical work of childrearing. Mothering is defined as the social practices of nurturing and caring for people, and thus it is not the exclusive domain of women (Arendell 2000). In most societies, however, women not only bear children but also are primary ca…
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP) is the name that has been given to a situation in which one person fabricates an illness in a second person and presents the second person to a doctor. The term was first used in the title of an article by Roy Meadow, a professor of pediatrics (Meadow 1977). MSbP has usually been used to refer to a situation involving a mother and child. Other adults, occasional…
Nagging and complaining are common features of family life. A complaint is a statement of grievance, discomfort, discontent, or dissatisfaction (Doelger 1984). Nagging refers to repeated or persistent complaints. Though complaint behavior is common, how couples and families manage their complaints is connected to their overall adjustment and satisfaction. To understand the role nagging and complai…
Personal names are one of the few cultural universals. Families in all societies provide personal names for the children born into them. By naming children, families are inducting their children into the family and the society. At the same time, they are expressing their hopes and desires for those children in the names they select. Names are both messages to children about who they are expected t…
The definition of neighborhood includes a territorially organized population with common ties and social interaction. It is a group of people living within a specific area, sharing common bonds, interacting with one another, and often having a common cultural and historical heritage (Lyon 1999). The amount and quality of the ties and interaction among those living in the neighborhood varies with e…
New Zealand families have experienced changes similar to those of families in other developed nations, including falling marriage and birth rates, more de facto relationships, rising divorce rates, more solo mothers, and increased maternal employment. Yet the cultural composition, isolation, and small population of these islands (less than four million people) have made families different from oth…
Nigeria is a multitribal, multilingual, and, consequently, multicultural country in the West African subregion. It occupies an area of 923,770 square kilometers with an estimated population of more than 100 million people. The capital of Nigeria is Abuja; the official language is English. Nigerians speak more than 300 languages and dialects; the major ones are Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba. Nigeria has …
Nonmarital childbearing is a part of the reproductive experience of many women, but much more so in some cultures than others. Nonmarital births are of two basic types. Some births, especially among younger women, are to those who never have been married. The other type of nonmarital childbearing occurs among women who were previously married, but who were divorced or widowed at the time of the bi…
The term nuclear family can be defined simply as a wife/mother, a husband/father, and their children. However, this straightforward structural definition is surrounded by a cloud of ambiguity and controversy. Most of the debates have centered around three questions. First, is the nuclear family universal—found in every known human society? Second, is the nuclear group the essential form of …
Only children are people who grow up without siblings. They have been stereotyped as "selfish," "lonely," and "maladjusted." Early in the twentieth century, the emerging discipline of psychology portrayed only children as inevitably pathological. However, since that time, hundreds of studies about only children have been conducted, and the over-all conclus…
Children learn to resist and, if necessary, oppose the will of others as part of their normal development. The refusal to conform to the ordinary requirements of authority and a willful contrariness is called oppositionality, and manifests itself during childhood with behaviors such as stubbornness, argumentativeness, tantrums, noncompliance, and defiance. Children's prosocial impulses beco…
Researchers and social policy makers have long been interested in the developmental impact of institutionalization. Are young children who have experienced extreme deprivation in the first year or two of their lives ever able to overcome such poor developmental beginnings? Children in orphanages have been studied in many parts of the world (e.g., Iran, Lebanon, United States, Greece, Romania, Russ…
Parenting education may be defined as any deliberate effort to help parents be more effective in caring for children. There are many different processes for educating parents, including group meetings, resource centers, newsletters, radio programs, home visits, mentoring, Internet resources, support groups, and books. The content of these different efforts varies substantially, ranging from behavi…
The study of human development is centrally concerned with understanding the processes that lead adults to function adequately within their cultures. These skills include an understanding of—and adherence to—the moral standards, conventional rules, and customs of the society. They also include maintaining close relationships with others, developing the skills to work productively, an…
The successful formation and navigation of interpersonal relationships with peers is a process central to adolescent development in all cultures. In European-American cultural contexts, an everincreasing amount of each day is spent in the company of peers, from 10 percent as early as two years of age to 40 percent between the ages of seven and eleven (Voydanoff and Donnelly 1999). By high school, …
Peru has a population of 26 million people, of whom 72 percent are concentrated in urban areas. Poverty is a major characteristic, with half of the population (48% in 2000) living in poverty. Even this striking statistic hides the extreme situations, especially in the mountains and rural areas of the Andes Mountains. According to 2000 data, 37 percent of people in urban areas live under the povert…
Phenomenology began as a primarily twentieth-century philosophical movement that argued that the best way to come to know the world is to rigorously examine how we apprehend the world through conscious experience (Spiegelberg 1982). Evidence for the influence of phenomenology on the practice of social science can be found in the widespread use of the term phenomenology for the description of human…
Like other social formations of traditional Asia and Europe, Filipino society has, in the post-Cold War era, moved from being a predominantly agricultural society to a modern one. Economic transformations have brought new social changes as the concept of the traditional family continues to be reinvented and transformed. Globalization has created international employment opportunities for migrant w…
Play serves different purposes at different ages. Jean Piaget (1962) delineated play into three major periods: (1) imitation and practice play; (2) symbolic play, which is pure assimilation or distortion of reality and implies representation of an absent object; and (3) games with rules, such as board games or marbles. Imitation and practice, the earliest form of play, occurs in the sensory-motor …
Since 1989, Poland has gone through extraordinary social changes. It has made a complex transition from socialism to democracy and capitalism and has joined the European Union (EU). The formerly implemented Marxist ideology of equality for all (including idioms of equal opportunities and rights, equal access to privileges and positions, etc.) is being replaced by the development of a free market, …