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Begins by defining consumer socialisation as the process by which young people learn to function in the marketplace; this is a key concept in studying children’s consumer behaviour and decision making. Outlines the ways that parents influence this process; they are role models, and communicate about purchases and consumption; co‐shopping and concept‐orientation are two aspects of this, as are the influence of the child and the amount of communication. Outlines the changes in family structure, including the increase in one‐parent families headed by women, which has resulted in more co‐shopping; the increase in the number of two‐income families; and the decline in numbers of children per family. Reports research on Belgian children on the four sub‐dimensions of parent ‐ child communication as affected by the family structure variables.

This paper is focussed on answering the following questions: How are poor families surviving in this era of COVID-19? What is life for children from poor families? What has become of their reality? To understand the realities of poor families and children during COVID-19, specifically in Ghana, this paper aims to analyse how COVID-19 has affected children from poor families in Ghana and how welfare institutions can work to provide rapid help to such families.

COVID-19 is affecting different populations in almost all parts of the world. One group that is likely to experience challenges are children because they have to depend on others for their survival. This study, therefore, provides an expert opinion on the issues that children in Ghana might face because of the global public health pandemic. Nonetheless, this research relied on secondary data from articles, journals, related studies, textbooks and relevant web pages to support the points made in the paper.

COVID-19 has put a lot of undue economic and social pressure on poor families. Due to these pressures, children from such families are likely to suffer a higher risk of child labour and streetism. Furthermore, they may miss out on the social and economic benefits the school system provides such as the free meals provided for public schools by the Government of Ghana under the school feeding programme.

Admittedly, there have been numerous studies since the outbreak of C0VID-19 pandemic. However, this paper is the first paper discussing into detail how COVID-19 has affected children from poor families and addresses how state welfare institutions can leverage on the use of efficient management information system to identify and support poor families during and post-COVID-19.

Societies the world over are currently experiencing a common phenomenon ‐ a greater rise in the number of two‐paycheck families than ever before! Knowing the stresses of rearing a family while simultaneously pursuing a dual‐earner lifestyle, two‐earner couples in many societies are also presumably experiencing the same dilemma ‐ whether or not to bear and raise children while simultaneously pursuing careers. In a sense, the very family rubric may be said to be currently at the crossroads. Controversies such as the “mommy track” (1989), and the mixed messages that are sent to working couples by societal culture, organisational values, and personal beliefs do not help to relieve the experienced tensions of the working couples either. It is important for dual‐career family members to know how parental status and the number of children impact on the quality of their experienced life, which is ultimately reflected in the state of their mental health. Being knowledgeable about this would help dual‐earner partners to make educated decisions regarding their desired family size.

Children's influence is becoming widely accepted across a range of family purchasing decisions. This paper considers the role and influence of children in family holiday decision making — an area which has been relatively under‐researched compared to other aspects of consumer behaviour. The research reveals that for parents holidays are all about compromise and risk, and that children are a key part of the decision making unit. 75% of parents show their children holiday brochures and ask what they think, and children proactively offer ideas and suggestions about the choice of holiday. The nature of their involvement will depend on their age more than any other factor.

For many people, the word “family brings to mind the traditional stereotype—Dad goes off to work while Mom stays home to run the house and mind the children. However, in today's society less than ten per cent of all families fall into this category. The majority of families in the United States are composed of a dual‐income couple or dual‐income parents. While many books and articles glorify the new “super‐family”—Dad and Mom both work and manage the house, while the children troop angelically and obediently to day‐care or school, and everyone enjoys “quality time”—these superhuman figures do not exist in reality. In fact, many working parents suffer guilt and anxiety because they believe that the “super‐family” is an achievable goal. The average working parent is pulled by work and by family responsibilities, while struggling to maintain both sanity and a sense of self in the process.

In this chapter, we report findings from a three-year, survey- and interview-based study involving 538 families bringing up children with disabilities in Alberta, Canada. The focus of the study was on the everyday challenge and accomplishment of sustaining a routine of daily life. The families who participated in this study were diverse, yet they struggled with many of the same questions and challenges. Four over-arching and inter-related challenges emerged from our analysis of the interview data. These are difficulty balancing the competing needs and wants of their children; tension between wanting to protect and wanting to integrate their child and family into the community; conflict between earning and care giving activities; and, trouble accessing and navigating supports and services. This chapter includes a small sample of illustrative family stories. The study findings suggest that parents are striving but struggle to meet normative expectations, that is, to simultaneously do all they can to help their disabled child and create a routine that balances the needs and interests of all their children. One conclusion is that service systems and professionals can help and or hinder families as they strive to create and maintain a daily routine that is fitted to the local ecology and family resource-base, and congruent with their values and goals, and with the needs, interests, and competencies of family members.

Effective collaboration with families when a child has chronic illness or disability involves the participation of all family members. Through a review of recent literature, this chapter provides a snapshot into the unique experiences and perspectives of fathers and siblings, exploring roles, and responsibilities often assumed by each, such as protector, advocate, teacher, and caretaker. Professionals are invited to build greater awareness of the unique insights fathers and siblings can contribute to program planning. Strategies to build partnerships that benefit all family members are suggested.

Purpose – This study examines parents’ financial stress associated with obtaining care for young children while employed in unstable low-wage jobs. The child care subsidy program aims to both improve child care quality and support employment, and we expect that a substantial infusion of resources into this program would reduce parents’ financial stress.

Methodology/approach – We use a mixed-methods research design to study parents’ financial costs of child care, how predictable the cost of child care is to a parent, and what strategies parents employ to manage child care costs.

Findings – We find that parents perceive the subsidy program essential to their ability to manage the needs of their children and working. Yet, receiving subsidies does not appear to alleviate parents’ financial stress because child care costs continue to consume a large share of the family's income and subsidy policies make it difficult for parents to predict their portion of the costs. Parents manage the large and unpredictable expense of child care by decreasing other expenditures and increasing debt.

Practical implications – Changing subsidy policies so they better fit the reality of these families’ lives could result in a more substantive stress reduction. States can reduce unpredictability by reducing and stabilizing participants’ child care cost burden and revising eligibility policy.

Originality/value of paper – This research project fills an important gap in our knowledge about financial stress of low-income working families, provides insights into the role subsidy program participation plays in these parents’ lives, and informs discussion of subsidy policy.

This paper describes the parent–child relationships of upper-middle-class Chinese parents and their adolescent children who were “parachuted” to the United States for private high schools. With parents remaining in China and children in the United States, thousands of miles away, such a transnational educational arrangement complicates the already volatile parent–child relationships during the adolescent years. Through ethnographic interviews of 41 students and 33 parents, I demonstrate different forms of child–parent relationships in a transnational education setting: those who found that the further physical and temporal distance has brought the parent–child relationship closer through frequent communications, children who experienced “accelerated growth” yet questioned the necessity, and delicate parent–child relationships due to increasing transnational cross-cultural or intergenerational differences. These types of parent–child relationships are not comprehensive of all the lived experiences of the “parachute generation,” yet they shed new light on transnational education and the unintended emotional dimensions of educational migration. In a transnational context for an economically well-off group, parental absence or separation of children and parents is no longer a clear-cut concept and has different layers of meanings, taking into account the frequency of communication, duration of spring and winter breaks and the existence of third-party agents such as for-profit intermediaries (or educational consultants) and host families. The diverse patterns of parent–child relations reveal the heterogeneity and complexities of “doing family” across geographic spaces and global educational hierarchies, as well as the roles of communication technologies, the tempo of mobilities and educational intermediaries.