Modern Families

Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms is a bold new work on the bold new landscape of today’s family. Family studies and child psychology have seen a recent outpouring of research on new family forms: now for the first time, groundbreaking research on parenting and child development is available in one volume. Modern Families analyzes parenting and child development in new family forms including lesbian mother families, gay father families, families headed by single mothers by choice and families created by assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), egg donation, sperm donation, embryo donation and surrogacy. The findings not only contest popular myths and assumptions about the social and psychological consequences for children being raised in new family forms, but also challenge well-established theories of child development that are founded upon the supremacy of the traditional family. University of Cambridge psychologist Susan Golombok argues that the quality of family relationships and the wider social environment are more influential in and important to children’s psychological development than are the number, gender, sexual orientation, or biological relatedness of their parents or the method of their conception.