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This chapter describes an attachment-based model of social support in couples, which emphasizes the interpersonal and transactional nature of support processes and focuses on the roles of both the care giver and the support seeker. The authors describe their ongoing programs of research on normative differences in care giving and seeking, as well as how individual differences in attachment security affect support processes.

This chapter examines how media coverage of specific safe haven relinquishment cases reinforces assumptions about responsible motherhood while also highlighting the pressures in women's lives that may lead them to seek safe haven surrender sites. Focusing on cases of the model use, near-miss use, and misuse of safe haven laws, it explores how birth mothers, birth fathers, and others are represented in media when a baby or child is left at or near an official or presumed safe haven site. In particular, it looks at the use of Nebraska's original safe haven law by mothers, fathers, and grandparents to relinquish distressed teenagers. It also analyzes the stereotype of the “safe haven mom” as a secretive, low-income teenager, who is often a woman of color, along with media coverage of cases of diverse women's safe haven surrender experiences. Finally, it discusses silence around the identity and views of safe haven moms and its implications for safe haven babies and their adoptive families.

This chapter examines the social value of safe haven babies and what contributes to their value. More specifically, it considers what the safe haven baby symbolizes in the adoption market and why some adoption advocates strongly oppose safe havens laws. It also explores the significance of the invisible safe haven mom in discussions of safe haven laws in terms of promoting fast-track adoptions. The chapter begins with an overview of the U.S. adoption system and its treatment of infants by age, race, and class, as well as the extent to which safe haven adoptions differ from planned domestic and transnational adoptions. It then analyzes media accounts of successful safe haven adoptions and comments by adoptive parents in relation to the process of adopting a safe haven baby. It also looks at adoptive mothers' longing to reach out to safe haven moms and the possibility that safe haven babies who are now teenagers may attempt to find their biological parents.

This conclusion summarizes the book's argument regarding safe haven laws and the discourses that support them within the context of reproductive justice, with particular emphasis on the complexities of pregnancy and motherhood experiences as well as the unequal social support available to women and girls. It considers the voices of safe haven moms who have expressed their experiences of relinquishing a newborn at a safe haven site to show how safe haven laws, portrayed by their advocates as offering a good choice for mothers, contribute to public policies and social attitudes concerning mothers and motherhood. It argues that the stated intent of safe haven laws —saving babies—conceals the social injustices that force some women and girls to relinquish their newborns.

Over the past two decades, we have been working to transform attachment theory into a general theory of adult personality and behavior in social relationships. This has required expanding the theory to address many new issues that have arisen in studies of adults. More emphasis has been placed on what Bowlby, the creator of attachment theory, called “behavioral systems.” In the present chapter we focus on the two behavioral systems that govern support seeking and support provision in relationships, the attachment and caregiving systems. The first of these, attachment, governs one person’s (e.g., an infant’s) reliance on another person (e.g., a parent) for protection and emotional support, especially when fear is aroused or help is needed. The second behavioral system, caregiving, is the motivational heart of a parent’s (or other adult’s) response to a child’s distress or need for support. It is the core of all empathic, compassionate reactions to other people’s needs. We begin by explaining the behavioral system construct in some detail and show how individual differences in a person’s attachment system affect the functioning of the caregiving system. We review examples from the attachment research literature, focusing on what attachment theorists call providing a “safe haven” for others in distress. We also describe the few studies that have addressed how individual differences in attachment affect what theorists call providing a “secure base” for others’ exploration and self-development. We then sketch some new studies of this important issue.

This chapter addresses a case of sexual misconduct that occurred in the workplace. This case involved Candie and her primary care physician, Dr. Mark Berger, who apparently asked for sexual favors after Candie asked him to refer her to a neurologist that he knew. Due to the small amount of data available—Candie presented two recordings of her thirty-minute meetings with Dr. Berger—the author used close reading, or explication de text, in order to analyze these conversations. These conversations demonstrate classic examples of verbal dueling, which usually occurs between two people who have separate agendas, and the safe haven conversational strategy, where a person returns to his/her safe haven topics whenever it becomes obvious that he/she is unable to get the other person to agree to his/her agenda.

This chapter focuses on the role media can play in bettering the lives of young children globally. Although media can have negative influences on child development, we emphasize the positive potential that holistic and developmentally appropriate communication can have on young children and caregivers. Communication for, with, and about young children that is inclusive and culturally sensitive can help them develop cognitively, socially, and emotionally, especially the most disadvantaged and vulnerable. It can also strengthen, be supportive of, and complement broader integrated early child development strategies and specific development goals. We review research and suggest four principles and supporting guidelines for using communication to achieve these goals. The chapter describes several examples of successful communication for young children from low- and middle-income countries. We conclude with recommendations for policymakers and programmers who wish to support similar initiatives.

This chapter examines representations of pregnant women who cope with “unwanted newborns,” as seen in infant abandonment prevention advocacy, safe haven legal advocacy, and media coverage of women who have abandoned or safely surrendered newborns. Safe haven laws encourage “a subtle structure of surveillance over women, warning society to be alert to mothers who might abandon—or abort—their children.” The chapter considers how this surveillance structure is advanced by advocates who target teenagers and school-age populations. To understand how baby safe haven advocates have publicized the laws and educated the public about the need for them, the chapter looks at public service announcements, short videos, television and radio stories, websites, school curricula, and Facebook pages. It considers how these safe haven awareness campaigns promote visible images of good and bad mothers, and thus narrow ideas about the nature of maternal love and who deserves to be a mother.

The rise of the RMB has been impressive by any standard although the currency still has a long way to go before it becomes a major reserve currency that accounts for a substantial portion of global foreign exchange reserves. This chapter concludes the book with the prognosis that, so long as the Chinese government plays its cards right with further reforms and so long as the economic risks are managed, the RMB could become a significant reserve currency over the next one to two decades. At the same time, the Chinese government’s repudiation of broader political, legal, and institutional reforms implies that the RMB will not ascend to the status of a safe haven currency.

This book explores the social politics of legal infant abandonment in advocacy and media discourses surrounding safe haven laws, which allow a parent to relinquish a newborn legally and anonymously at a specified institutional location such as a hospital or fire station. More specifically, it considers the social constructions of motherhood perpetuated by safe haven advocates as well as the social injustices that compel infant abandonment. Using a feminist framework, the book offers insights into the contested nature of what defines good and bad motherhood and examines the issues that surround unsafe infant abandonment from a reproductive justice perspective, with particular emphasis on abortion and adoption politics. This introduction discusses critical perspectives on why we do not need safe haven laws, the cultural components of wanted and unwanted motherhood, and assumptions about maternal love, infant abandonment, adoption, and infanticide. It also provides an overview of the chapters in this book.

This chapter examines how and why infant abandonment has led to individual, regional, and national initiatives to save babies' lives. It considers several narratives of social responsibility that are embedded within infant abandonment prevention discourses and used by some activists in their campaign to urge women to safely relinquish unwanted newborns so that they could be placed in loving adoptive families, and why some activists gather together to honor dead abandoned infants and use the religious notion of saving their souls. It also discusses infant abandonment prevention in relation to antiabortion philosophies and aims, and the view that pregnant women who may unsafely abandon their babies represent a threat to individual infants as well as to the meaning of motherhood. Finally, it describes similarities in the language, strategies, and philosophies used by safe haven advocacy organizations and crisis pregnancy centers to reach individual pregnant women, including teenagers.

This chapter examines how parenting has been defined and studied by advocates of attachment theory and research in that area. It also describes attachment research tools which can be used to assist policymakers and judges with decision-making processes regarding parent custody, child protection, and the prevention of child abuse. According to John Bowlby's landmark trilogy, Attachment, Separation, and Loss, parents are attachment figures on whom children depend as a secure base from which the child explores (away) when feeling curious; and a safe haven to which the child returns when frightened or otherwise distressed. There is an implicit interplay between the motivation to attach (in search of familiarity/safety) and the motivation to explore (in search of novelty/danger). Getting the balance right in one's personal and family life is an ongoing challenge for every parent (and child). The chapter reviews the psychological characteristics of the parent who meets the demands to serve as both a secure base and a safe haven, and the lifelong relevance of these concepts for healthy child, adolescent, and adult development. It considers Bowlby's writings on parenthood along with an account of the extent to which his views from the 1950s and 1960s have been validated by fifty years of systematic research.

This chapter draws a distinction between a reserve currency and a safe haven currency, one that investors turn to for safety during times of financial turmoil. The chapter identifies the characteristics of economies that are home to safe haven currencies. These characteristics include an open and transparent democratic form of government; an independent judiciary; trusted public institutions; central bank independence; and freedom of expression. The chapter argues that the present Chinese leadership’s repudiation of broader political, legal, and institutional reforms makes it unlikely that the RMB will ascend to the status of a safe haven currency.