Michigan Family Review最新文献

{"title":"Familial Influence in the Autobiographies of Black South African and African American Women Activists","authors":"M. White","doi":"10.3998/MFR.4919087.0010.103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/MFR.4919087.0010.103","url":null,"abstract":"Feminist scholars have criticized social movement theory for its male bias in explaining and understanding resistance. This male bias leads theorists to focus on constructs such as organizational structure and networks, thereby ignoring women's methods of resistance and their participation in liberation struggles. As Kuumba (2001, p. 107) noted, \"some resistance strategies engaged in by women as an outgrowth of their productive and reproductive labor are the very ones that are submerged and hidden,\" (see also Taylor, 1995; Foweraker, 1995; Aulette & Mills, 1988; Baver, 1989; Bookman & Morgen, 1988; Beuchler, 1993; Cohen, 1985). Such analyses challenge the false dichotomy between political and personal spheres of resistance, in which the male sphere of resistance is seen as the political structure and women are conceptualized less as activists because their sphere is seen to be the home. Women's resistance, critics have argued, is \"masked by traditional categories used to assess political action\" (Naples, 1991, p. 478). A feminist analysis of movement theory suggests that the focus on the public sphere, in which men are seen to exert power and efficacy, should be accompanied by complementary analyses of resistance and activism as they take place in the private realm.The family is a major private site in which activism occurs. Although the relationship between the family and activism has not been the subject of extensive research, two distinct literatures deal with the topic. One focuses on the nature of the family as a microcosm of the intersection of race, class, and gender that characterizes the public world; activism is seen to develop in response to this microcosm. Not only is the impact of these systems of oppression experienced at the level of the family but \"ideas about the family also operate as a cognitive scaffold used to construct intersecting systems of oppression\" (Hill Collins, 2000, p. 48). The family illuminates the convergence of social and gendered hierarchies in its struggle to access prestige, economic, social, and political power and serves as an important place for understanding the development of resistance strategies against intersecting systems of oppression.While some scholars view the family as a microcosm of oppression, others argue that the effects of imperialism and colonialism on the family structure can perpetuate progressive changes in male/female relationships and therefore challenge the assumptions of traditional gender role socialization. Caulfield (1974), for example, explored the non-Western family structure as it is impacted by imperialism. The family, she argued, is the most basic of institutions \"involved in the culture of resistance\" (p. 73). Through their \"creativity and resourcefulness\" (p. 69), families develop survival strategies that serve as \"the cultural response to imperialism\" (p. 69). She posited that families, \"generally under the leadership of women, have fought back, defending subsistence prod","PeriodicalId":32430,"journal":{"name":"Michigan Family Review","volume":"27 1","pages":"27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73481359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conducting Multiracial Feminist Family Research: Challenges and Rewards of Recruiting a Diverse Sample","authors":"Nancy Meezy","doi":"10.3998/MFR.4919087.0010.104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/MFR.4919087.0010.104","url":null,"abstract":"In order to fully understand families, sociologists must place race, class, gender, and sexuality at the center of their research. My graduate training in sociology guided me toward a feminist analysis of the intersections of race, class, and gender--what Baca Zinn and Dill (1996) referred to as \"multiracial feminism.\" Multiracial feminism is a social structural and social constructionist approach that \"challenge[s] the hegemony of feminisms constructed primarily around the lives of white middle-class women\" (Baca Zinn & Dill, 1996, p. 323). Rather than thinking about women as a cohesive group, multiracial feminism places difference at the center of its analysis to examine how women are dissimilar from one another based on race and class. Just as feminists critique non-feminists for marginalizing women, multiracial feminism critiques earlier feminisms for making invisible and distorting the lives of women of color (Baca Zinn & Dill, 1996).Many sociologists agree that theory drives method (Deem, 2002; Harding, 1991; Thompson, 1992). A commitment to multiracial feminism, therefore, suggests that researchers must conduct studies focusing on how people's experiences differ based on their specific race, class, gender, and sexual locations. For this study, I researched the lesbian baby boom (Lewin, 1993; O'Sullivan, 1995; Weston, 1991), focusing on lesbians' decisions to become mothers or remain childfree. The lesbian baby boom has been forming over the past 20 to 30 years. It started with women who became mothers within heterosexual identities and then later identified as lesbians, a group that I refer to as first-generation lesbian mothers. More recently, there has been an increase in second-generation lesbian mothers, that is, lesbians within their identities as lesbians who have been choosing motherhood by adopting, birthing children, and becoming foster parents (Lewin 1993; Silber 1991). At the turn of the millennium, an estimated 22 percent of partnered lesbians had children in their homes (Black, Gates, Sanders, & Taylor 2000). Furthermore, somewhere between 780,000 and 9 million children live in lesbian and gay families (Stacey & Biblarz 2001).While lesbians have been forming families both with and without children over the past 20 to 30 years, they have been doing so within a rocky and often contradictory social and cultural climate. Despite this trend, the few studies conducted on children of lesbian families show that these children are at least as \"normal\" and \"healthy\" as children raised in heterosexual families (Stacey & Biblarz, 2001). Children of lesbians show no more psychotic disorders, anxiety levels, depression, emotional, or behavioral problems than those raised in heterosexual families. Furthermore, children of lesbian parents have the same quality of peer relationships as children of heterosexual parents (Golombok & Tasker, 1997; Mooney-Somers & Golombok, 2000; Patterson, 1996; Stacey & Biblarz, 2001).Because much of the literatu","PeriodicalId":32430,"journal":{"name":"Michigan Family Review","volume":"1 1","pages":"45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79613562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Should I Stay or Should I Go Now: Wives' Participation in the Decision to Move for Their Spouses' Jobs","authors":"E. Whitaker","doi":"10.3998/MFR.4919087.0010.106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/MFR.4919087.0010.106","url":null,"abstract":"In the United States, there is a national job market for employment, especially professional or managerial employment. When looking for a job or being considered for advancement within a company, individuals are competing with other job seekers nationwide, not just those in the area or within the company. Also, as more and more companies expand and become national--even global--possibilities within a company are geographically widespread. More and more people are asked or expected to relocate to other areas of the country in order to take a job, keep a job, or advance in a job. Hodson and Sullivan (2002) pointed out that more than half of all moves in the United States are believed to be work-related and that \"promotions, new job responsibilities and even just job retention are sometimes attached to geographic moves\" (p. 79).This study examined families with heterosexual, married spouses in the professional middle class and upper middle class whose employers have come to regard employee corporate relocation as commonplace and normative. In many cases, for professional middle-class jobs, employers subsidize moves by paying for move expenses and transaction costs associated with home sales and purchases (Worldwide Employee Relocation Council, 2005). Commonly, professional middle-class and upper-middle-class employees are relocated or asked to relocate repeatedly, \"sometimes as often as every two or three years and, on average, every five to seven years\" (Eby & Russell, 2000, p. 44).Hodson et al. (2002) contend that \"frequent transfer is a technique firms use to train managers and initiate them into the company\" (p. 313). Employers are so interested in maintaining a mobile workforce that they have formed committees, councils, and lobbying organizations that serve to research barriers to relocation; devise strategies to encourage relocation; reduce the attendant costs; and follow legislation that can impact relocation. These initiatives include the Worldwide Employee Relocation Council (ERC); national organizations like the Canadian Relocation Council; statewide organizations, such as the Kentucky Relocation Council; and regional, city-wide, or community-wide organizations like the Chicago Relocation Council.According to the Worldwide ERC, one trade association for individuals and businesses with an interest in workforce mobility, there are approximately 500,000 corporate-paid employee relocations within the U.S. each year. There is no available data on how many of those 500,000 moves involve children, but estimates say that about 80 percent of relocated employees are married (Eby & Russell, 2000). Using a conservative estimate of an average of two people being moved in each case, we can calculate that this phenomenon affects at least one million people each year including moved employees, spouses, and their dependent children.When families are moved to a new community to facilitate a job change for one member of the family, the other members of the ","PeriodicalId":32430,"journal":{"name":"Michigan Family Review","volume":"13 1","pages":"88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83473884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"'Staying at Home' versus 'Working': A Call for Broader Conceptualizations of Parenthood and Paid Work","authors":"Elizabeth R. Paré, Heather Dillaway","doi":"10.3998/MFR.4919087.0010.105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/MFR.4919087.0010.105","url":null,"abstract":"Every mother-to-be faces the decision of whether to participate in the paid work force while mothering or to disengage from the paid work force and make mothering her sole social role. Often this decision is portrayed in terms of whether one will be a \"stay-at-home\" and presumably \"full-time\" mother or a \"working mother\" and therefore one who prioritizes paid work. \"The dominant culture portrayal of work and family for women in the United States classifies women as either work oriented or family oriented\" (Garey, 1999, p. 6). Thus, women are socially constructed as either mothers or workers, but not both.Popular media from television images of mothers, advice and self-help books for expectant or new mothers, and news stories on motherhood all rely on this oversimplification. From Eisenberg et al.'s (2002) What to Expect When You Are Expecting which poses work/family as an either-or question, to Iovine's (1997) The Girlfriend's Guide which discusses the \"extreme difficulty\" new mothers face \"trying to combine it all,\" to W. Sears, M. Sears, R. Sears, & J. Sear's (2003) Baby Book which promotes a \"better baby\" through constant contact with the mother, experts continually suggest that women are mothers or workers. Recent news articles about professional women who are \"opting out\" of paid work in order to mother, or who struggle to balance the two, also perpetuate this dichotomy (Belkin, 2003; Warner, 2005).Parenting advice books, current news stories, and other forms of popular media help to create a binary between \"stay-at-home\" and \"working\" mothers, so that we are unable to conceptualize both statuses in the same person. Experts in popular media as well as academia refer to this rhetoric as an ideological war waging between two camps, with the \"stay-at-home\" (\"good\") mother pitted against the \"working\" (\"bad\") mother (Douglas, 2000; Hays, 1996; Johnston & Swanson, 2004). Proponents of each side of this \"Mommy War\" claim that their approach is the appropriate form of parenting in current times. In addition, both sides argue that society does not see the full value of what women do as mothers whether they are \"at home\" or \"at work.\" Yet, neither characterization of motherhood necessarily reflects what all mothers actually experience.We argue, as other feminist scholars have (e.g., Garey, 1999; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Uttal, 2004), that the dichotomous construction of mother versus worker oversimplifies the complexities of motherhood and work in the current economic system which requires most adults to participate in the workforce. Specifically, it assumes that those who are at home are not participating in the paid work force and that those who are working outside the home are disengaged from being mothers. The reality is not clear cut since stay-at-home mothers have varied levels of interaction with their children, complete domestic work without receiving salaried income, and work for paid income either from the home or part-time outside the home ","PeriodicalId":32430,"journal":{"name":"Michigan Family Review","volume":"98 1","pages":"66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79695691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Special Issue on Feminism and Family Life","authors":"M. B. Zinn, Heather Dillaway","doi":"10.3998/MFR.4919087.0010.101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/MFR.4919087.0010.101","url":null,"abstract":"Feminism has revolutionized the family field. Probably no field of study is more profoundly influenced by feminist thought. In the four decades since feminist scholars introduced a gendered understanding of family life, the field has absorbed feminist influences. Feminist concepts and investigative strategies have produced new descriptions of family experience, conceptualized family forms and family processes in new ways, and identified new topics for investigation. Feminist scholars have also illustrated the general importance of family studies, elevating our general interest in and concern for this social institution; studies of families and family life are now seen as parallel to studies of individuals or groups in other social institutions.Unlike other disciplines, which marginalize feminist works, the family field now incorporates key feminist elements into its very core. Not all family scholars work from an explicitly feminist perspective, but many feminist concerns have become embedded in the foundational frameworks of the field. At the same time, feminist research and activism flourish throughout the family domain. Family researchers and practitioners can draw from a voluminous and generative feminist literature on every conceivable family topic.This issue of the Michigan Family Review undertakes a feminist examination of family life. A call for papers produced a submission of 10 papers, which were then reviewed by referees. We anticipated that papers submitted and finally selected would present a blend of theoretical, empirical, and practice-based orientations, and that they would strike a balance between family related disciplines. This was not the case. In both submissions and final selections, sociological studies outnumber the others. Although all contributors are sociologists, the articles use intellectual traditions drawn from a variety of disciplines along with wide-ranging methods of inquiry.To make our feminist issue of the Michigan Family Review as current and comprehensive as possible, we invited scholars to review recently published books on gender and family and to pay special attention to their feminist and policy implications. The books selected for review include the topics of gender equity in national family and work policy (Jacobs and Gerson), caregiving among families of different class locations (Hansen), the impact of Viagra on intimate relationships (Loe), men's contemporary experiences of fatherhood (Townsend), the uniqueness of African American families (Hill), and a history of marriage (Coontz). While the books represent the national community of feminist family scholars, many of the research-based articles in this issue examine family life in Michigan communities. All of the contributors to this collection have strong connections to Michigan colleges and universities.We have tried to make this issue appealing to family scholars and practitioners as well as feminists across a range of disciplines. The selection o","PeriodicalId":32430,"journal":{"name":"Michigan Family Review","volume":"69 1","pages":"1"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77540420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor's Note: A Message of Thanks","authors":"Libby Balter Blume","doi":"10.3998/mfr.4919087.0010.108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/mfr.4919087.0010.108","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":32430,"journal":{"name":"Michigan Family Review","volume":"188 1","pages":"120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75094517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"More Good Times and Hard Times: Family Diversity in a Rural Michigan Community","authors":"Barbara Wells","doi":"10.3998/mfr.4919087.0010.102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/mfr.4919087.0010.102","url":null,"abstract":"Rural America is widely assumed to be a positive and wholesome environment for families. The experiences of the women studied here do not uniformly fit that optimistic construction. This study joins a significant literature that challenges the idealization of rural family life (e.g., Bokemeier & Garkovich, 1991; Egan, 2002; Gringeri, 2001; Willits & Luloff, 1995). This article presents the results of a follow-up study to a 1995-1996 case study of White rural families in a small Michigan community. In the summer of 2002, I returned to the research community to interview a subgroup of women who had participated in the initial study. In this paper, I summarize the results of the initial study and present key findings from the new research. [2]The central concerns of the initial study were family structure, economic subsistence, and difference. I explored family structure by asking: How are the family households in this sample configured? Are current household arrangements longstanding or are they characterized by substantial fluidity? I addressed economic subsistence by asking: What decisions do family members make and what actions do they take to sustain their households economically? I examined difference in the experience of rural families by analyzing them through the lens of social class, asking: How does family experience vary by social class? How do the ways that families are structured and sustain themselves economically differ by social class?Diversity is doubtlessly a hallmark of contemporary family life. Family scholars recognize that race, class, and gender create a multiplicity of social locations from which individuals create and maintain their family lives. Among this sample of White women, diversity in family experience appeared along the lines of social class. Both family structure variation and differentiation in patterns of resource generation were associated with the social-class position of families. Middle-class families had secure economic resources and stable family circumstances. Moving down the social-class ladder, I found increasingly insecure economic resources and unstable family circumstances. Research participants in higher social-class locations generally described their family lives in terms of \"good times\" while individuals in lower social-class locations were more likely to describe \"hard times.\" The follow-up study finds that patterns identified in the initial research generally continued in the years between the initial and subsequent studies.A substantial body of literature documents how macrostructural changes in recent decades have created diverse and challenging economic contexts for constructing and maintaining family life (e.g., Edin & Lein, 1996; Nelson & Smith, 1999; Rubin, 1994; Stacey, 1990; Wilson, 1987). This literature illumines the interrelationship between households and the communities in which they are situated. The salient point for this research is that individuals make family-related decisions","PeriodicalId":32430,"journal":{"name":"Michigan Family Review","volume":"35 1","pages":"7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76331966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Innovations in Family Practice: Context Matters","authors":"E. Lewis","doi":"10.3998/MFR.4919087.0009.101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/MFR.4919087.0009.101","url":null,"abstract":"This first on-line edition of the Michigan Family Review focuses on diverse methods of practice with families. We have chosen a framework of family practice rather than family therapy (a) to highlight the importance of social, historical, and political contexts for understanding intra- and extra-familial interactions, including that of the therapeutic alliance; (b) as a way of illuminating the number of disciplines engaged in individual, couple, family and group-oriented family interventions; and (c) to recognize some of the innovative strategies codified during the last two decades to improve the overall well being of families.Today, Michigan's families face a variety of challenges that were unimaginable even two decades ago. The extent to which these examples are becoming the norm rather than the exception has become apparent in many public and private arenas in the state, as illustrated by the following situations faced by Michigan families during the last ten years:* A kindergarten-aged girl shot and killed at school by a classmate. A detailed examination of the case revealed a brother who had informally adopted his sister's children because they had become homeless due to the inadequacy of the mother's income (Danziger, Ananat, & Browning, 2004). Although this mother took several buses from one community to another daily for employment opportunities in order to meet the requirements of the 1996 PRWORA (Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which changed welfare \"as we knew it\") she could not afford to live in the community in which she worked nor could she afford child care for her children.* Changes in the provision of physical, occupational, and speech therapy by major insurers in the state, limiting reimbursement for combined therapies to 60 over the course of a lifetime. This change has occurred at a time when Michigan's population is aging, and the probability of the need for these services is increasing. The Michigan Brain Injury Association (BIA) has highlighted the need at the state and local levels for ongoing services for those who have sustained brain injuries from vehicular accidents, strokes and aneurysms, and children not wearing protective headgear while riding bicycles (TBI Challenge, 2004). In any of those cases, 60 visits for truly rehabilitative therapy might be completed within the first two months.* A rural male high school student who entertained a contact in an Internet chat room with his plans to use explosives and weapons to wreak havoc on his Michigan high school. When finally apprehended, it became clear that his father knew about and approved of the cache of weapons his son had been stockpiling. In addition, many of these weapons were procured with the assistance of a nearby neighbor. One of the little known provisions of the PRWORA regulations was the elimination of supportive services to children who were considered to have emotional or behavioral disorders, even if these significantly low","PeriodicalId":32430,"journal":{"name":"Michigan Family Review","volume":"6 1","pages":"1"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82529407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Family Therapy Meets Internal Medicine: Innovations in Medical Family Therapy","authors":"Gary H. Bischof, Laura A. Mohr, Monica L. Lieser","doi":"10.3998/mfr.4919087.0009.103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/mfr.4919087.0009.103","url":null,"abstract":"This article describes a growing area of the field of marriage and family therapy that is termed \"medical family therapy\" or \"collaborative family health care.\" In short, this area involves collaborative approaches to health care in which health care providers and marriage and family therapists or other family-oriented mental health professionals work together to provide an integrated, biopsychosocial approach to care that actively considers and engages the patient's family or support system in the treatment process.Review of LiteratureMedical family therapy or collaborative family health care has been billed as the \"next frontier\" of marriage and family therapy (Bloch, 1992). Medical family therapy involves collaboration among family therapists and health care providers who, in more integrated collaborative models, may be practicing in the same facility. This interest in coordinated care has developed in the context of a call for more cost-effective and innovative approaches to health care (McDaniel, Hepworth & Doherty, 1992; Patterson, Peek, Heinrich, Bischoff, & Scherger, 2002). Four factors have contributed to the interest in collaborative approaches:* First, an enormous number of mental health problems are presented in medical settings, particularly in primary care. Up to 40 percent of primary care patients have a diagnosable mental disorder, and one-half to two-thirds of those meeting criteria for a mental disorder go unrecognized (deGruy, 1997).* Second, a small percentage (10%) of patients, termed \"high utilizers,\" accounts for 40 to 60 percent of health care expenditures. Half of these high utilizers have psychiatric diagnoses, such as depression or somatization disorder, and frequently have a history of abuse or neglect (Seaburn, Lorenz, Gunn, Gawinski, & Mauksch, 1996). These high utilizers often are not amenable to a traditional biomedical approach and demand expensive diagnostic procedures that often are unable to detect any observable biomedical cause for their complaints.* Third, shorter hospital stays and increasing use of outpatient surgery have led to family members taking on greater burdens of health care in the home (McDaniel et al., 1992). Thus, family members are providing significant amounts of informal health care but are infrequently actively involved in the treatment process by medical providers.* Fourth, advances in health care and prescription medications have meant more focus on chronic illness and lifestyle issues, which often can be greatly influenced by family dynamics and relationships (Campbell, 2003; Rolland, 1994).Active family involvement can play a significant role in improving treatment adherence over the course of chronic illnesses. In each of these four areas, one can see how the addition of a mental health professional, such as a marriage and family therapist working alongside medical providers, would serve to enhance the overall health care services for patients and their family members.Given these four ","PeriodicalId":32430,"journal":{"name":"Michigan Family Review","volume":"79 10 1","pages":"19-29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85403070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Afterword: Challenges for Family Practitoners","authors":"E. Lewis","doi":"10.3998/mfr.4919087.0009.106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/mfr.4919087.0009.106","url":null,"abstract":"Afterword: Challenges for Family PractitionersEdith A. Lewis, Guest EditorIn the preceding pages, contributors have offered glimpses of families engaged in the growing activity of transracial adoption, strategies for working with family members in a medical setting, the use of diagnostic and intervention tools such as genograms, the changing nature of grandparenting, and recognizing the myriad roles family practitioners may play in influencing the course and content of the family intervention. All of these articles offer valuable information for those working with Michigan's 1.3 million families (National Center for Children in Poverty, 2004).Throughout this issue, readers have been encouraged to place families within the numerous interacting contexts that give meaning to their lives. Without doing so, we risk designing interventions for families as we wish they were, rather than as they are. How might family practitioners address the changing realities of families whose life situations differ so much from their predecessors in historical and herstorical time? I suggest that the experiences of the families we have met in these pages leave us with three overarching questions that challenge our ongoing scholarship and practice:* Where do we need to focus our energies as family practitioners and researchers who are mindful of the group, community, societal and global influences on family life?* What or whom have we consistently neglected in our overall theory and practice endeavors?* What roles might we play in improving the overall well being of families within their social, political, historical contexts?Challenge 1: Where Do We Need to Focus Our Energies?Even with the range of innovative practice methods available to family practitioners, some families and their members continue to experience major threats to their overall well being. Almost one-third of Michigan's 2.4 million children live in low-income families. Only 18 percent of those low-income families have unemployed parents. The majority (48%) of low income families has at least one adult who is employed full-time year-round (National Center for Children in Poverty, 2004). The consequences of this poverty were identified in the first example provided in the introduction to this issue. Associated with such poverty is an increased probability of homelessness and serious housing problems (National Low-Income Housing Coalition, 2004).Parents who wish to work may find it extremely difficult to play an active role in their children's lives and meet the demands of the low-wage, service sector jobs our nation has been generating for the last 10 years (Malveaux, 2004). As our colleagues in family studies have demonstrated, children with supportive parents become healthier adults. We need to know how to increase the probability that parents will be able to provide the support their children need now in order to meet the future needs of the state and nation.Offering some insight into this challenge,","PeriodicalId":32430,"journal":{"name":"Michigan Family Review","volume":"30 1","pages":"45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81533272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}