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This chapter considers familial relationships as obstacles to the realization of egalitarian ideals. It has been argued that the conflict between the family and equality is in fact much less stark than is commonly recognized. Parents and children can enjoy healthy familial relationships, and parents can exercise all the rights needed for those relationships to make their distinctive contribution to well-being, without our having to tolerate anything like the kinds of inequalities of opportunity to which familial interactions currently give rise. This argument, however, still has family values on one side of the line and distributive considerations on the other. The chapter suggests the former be incorporated into the latter, as it were, by treating familial relationship goods as distribuenda: that is, as among the goods that people should have opportunities, perhaps equal opportunities, for.

The family is justified because it produces certain goods that would otherwise not be available, or, in some cases, would be much more difficult to produce. These goods—familial relationship goods—are enjoyed by children and by the adults who are their parents. This chapter focuses on the goods it produces for children, arguing that their interests are such as to support the claim that children have a right to be raised by parents—in families. First, it defines what we mean by children and childhood. It then explains what interests are, and describes the interests that children may have. Next, it makes the argument that children have a right to a parent, which involves three claims: children have rights; children are appropriate objects of paternalistic care; and for a child's vital interests to be met, she must be cared for, consistently, by only a small number of people. The chapter goes on to discuss how a biological connection between parent and child relates to our account of children's right to a parent, and concludes by looking, briefly, at the implied duty to parent.

This chapter begins by explaining the role of philosophy in evaluating education policy. It then summarizes a theory of what is valuable about the family, introducing the idea of “familial relationship goods,” which yields an account of the kind of rights parents have with respect to their children. Subsequent sections set out the implications of this view, specifically with respect to parents' rights to shape their children's values and to confer advantage on them. The chapter emphasizes the limits of those rights while also considering how policymakers might best promote an optimal balance of values—including “family values”—in circumstances in which many believe those rights are extensive.

This chapter describes a number of early Indian inscriptions which mention Buddhist monks, nuns, and laymen in terms of familial relationships. These inscriptions could be explained away as records of children who were abandoned and forsaken by their parents when the latter “left home for the religious life.” Extant Buddhist monastic law codes, however, preserve stories about men “leaving home” to become monks with their young children, and children who, after joining the monastery, still call their monk-fathers “Daddy.” There are also narratives of mothers and daughters who leave home for the religious life together. Such narratives raise questions of interpretation with regard to the phrase “to go forth from home into homelessness,” which lies at the very heart of our understanding of the nature of Buddhist renunciation. This chapter argues that the phrase is best understood figuratively rather than literally.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book looks at the families/relationships conceived through donors, and documents these newly developing connections. It proposes a legal basis for the development of these new communities, exploring what it would mean for the law to consider and support these different sites for forming familial relationships. It explains why we should support the new kinship. The book is grounded firmly in the importance of family: donor-conceived people are created to expand or create families, which consist of people (not genes). Consequently, the law needs to shift its focus away from medicine and technology and toward family and constitutional law. The fertility industry, because it is ultimately about creating families, must be subjected to laws that regulate people, not things. Finally, in thinking through the issues in the donor world, the book shows how donor families both reinforce and complicate the meaning of family, offering lessons for all families by questioning what makes a family.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book looks at the families/relationships conceived through donors, and documents these newly developing connections. It proposes a legal basis for the development of these new communities, exploring what it would mean for the law to consider and support these different sites for forming familial relationships. It explains why we should support the new kinship. The book is grounded firmly in the importance of family: donor-conceived people are created to expand or create families, which consist of people (not genes). Consequently, the law needs to shift its focus away from medicine and technology and toward family and constitutional law. The fertility industry, because it is ultimately about creating families, must be subjected to laws that regulate people, not things. Finally, in thinking through the issues in the donor world, the book shows how donor families both reinforce and complicate the meaning of family, offering lessons for all families by questioning what makes a family.

This chapter argues how Confucianism's views on moral cultivation can not only help in the development of a child, but in society as well as they can lead to certain kinds of social and policy change. Although Confucian tradition heavily emphasizes the priority of familial relationships in moral development and human flourishing, Kongzi maintains there is a close relationship between the flourishing of individual families and the quality of the state. His Analects asserts that moral cultivation helps to explain how people come to have certain attitudes toward others, attitudes that emerge through the development of a set of virtues. These virtues are all ultimately rooted in the family, for the virtue most closely tied to healthy parent–child relationships in the Confucian view—filial piety—provides the foundation for Confucian moral cultivation. The chapter outlines a number of specific areas in which Confucian views can augment and support efforts to promote social change as well as policy reform.

This chapter shows how Birch Anderson claimed allotments for himself, his wife, Lizzie, and their infant daughter, Willie Mae. Birch's selections exemplify how familial relationships shaped the ways that Cherokees picked the land that they would own as individuals. Rather than combining the allotments of his family into a large, contiguous tract of land, Birch dispersed them across his community. He chose an allotment near his maternal kin, the Mitchells, for himself, and he picked land for Lizzie closer to her family, the Browns. He selected a homestead for his daughter that included a house and cultivated field belonging to his maternal uncle, John Mitchell. Anderson, in other words, used allotment to further connect his small, growing nuclear family into his and his wife's network of extended relations.

This chapter takes a look at how the life story sometimes takes the form of a renegotiation, a reassessment — and not always an entirely coherent one — of a Victorian childhood through twentieth-century eyes, rather than a straightforward narration of earlier life events. For those born in the late Victorian or Edwardian eras, their life story might be created in the 1960s, 1970s, or even the 1980s — a period of rising affluence and rapidly changing family values. Although Victorian families were not necessarily demonstrative and affectionate in ways that are recognisable to modern readers, these relationships mattered. Writers may not have consistently reflected upon how they felt about their parents, but many nonetheless wrote enough about their experiences of family life for us to attempt to explore the emotional fabric of family life. Of familial relationships, it was those between parents and children that the autobiographers returned to most regularly, and of these, relationships with fathers are in many ways the most straightforward to comprehend.

This concluding chapter sheds light on the structural duplicity of the Troubled Families Programme (TFP) across a number of areas. It presents three main principles of the TFP. First, it examines the role of ‘extraordinary workers’, the bureaucratic heroes who are able to support troubled families no matter what challenges they face. Second, the chapter turns to the allegedly special and different relationship that exists between these workers and the troubled families they work with. Finally, the chapter considers the idea that families' lives have been turned around by the TFP, drawing on data from the evaluation but also by scrutinising the many loopholes in the Payment by Results mechanism for the first phase.

This chapter delves into an analysis of a more classic Hitchcock suspense thriller in De Palma's Obsession (1976). It considers the movie's themes of the value of love and money, as well as the idolatrous obsessions of a deceased loved one, and the tensions this creates within a family as a mirror to De Palma's own relationship with his parents. Like the character of Sandra (Genevieve Bujold), the young De Palma tended to idealize his mother and to demonize his father. De Palma's father had compounded his workaholic “desertion” by sleeping with a nurse at the office, which led to a suicide attempt on the part of De Palma's mother. The comparisons, however, extend beyond the trope of the avenging child, moving forward to a more mature understanding of a one-sided, childish perception De Palma and Sandra's fathers.