Cohabitation is an arrangement where two people are not married but live together. They are often involved in a romantic or sexually intimate relationship on a long-term or permanent basis. Such arrangements have become increasingly common in Western countries since the late 20th century, being led by changing social views, especially regarding marriage, gender roles and religion.
Sex education, also known as sexual education, sexualityeducation or sex ed, is the instruction of issues relating to human sexuality, including emotional relations and responsibilities, human sexual anatomy, sexual activity, sexual reproduction, age of consent, reproductive health, reproductive rights, sexual health, safe sex and birth control. Sex education which includes all of these issues is known as comprehensive sex education, and is often opposed to abstinence-only sex education, which only focuses on sexual abstinence. Sex education may be provided by parents or caregivers or as part at school programs and public health campaigns. In some countries it is known as Relationships and Sexual health education.
A single parent is a person who lives with a child or children and who does not have a spouse or live-in partner to assist in the upbringing or support of the child. Reasons for becoming a single parent include divorce, break-up, abandonment, domestic violence, rape, death of the other parent, childbirth by a single person or single-person adoption. A single parent family is a family with children that is headed by a single parent.
Family planning is "the ability of individuals and couples to anticipate and attain their desired number of children and the spacing and timing of their births. It is achieved through use of contraceptive methods and the treatment of involuntary infertility." Family planning may involve consideration of the number of children a woman wishes to have, including the choice to have no children, and the age at which she wishes to have them. These matters are influenced by external factors such as marital situation, career considerations, financial position, and any disabilities that may affect their ability to have children and raise them. If sexually active, family planning may involve the use of contraception and other techniques to control the timing of reproduction.
Head Start is a program of the United States Department of Health and Human Services that provides comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and families. The program's services and resources are designed to foster stable family relationships, enhance children's physical and emotional well-being, and establish an environment to develop strong cognitive skills. The transition from preschool to elementary school imposes diverse developmental challenges that include requiring the children to engage successfully with their peers outside the family network, adjust to the space of a classroom, and meet the expectations the school setting provides.
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is a federal assistance program of the United States. It began on July 1, 1997, and succeeded the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, providing cash assistance to indigent American families through the United States Department of Health and Human Services. TANF is often simply referred to as welfare.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) is a United States federal law passed by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The bill implemented major changes to U.S. social welfare policy, replacing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
John Mordecai Gottman is an American psychologist, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington, who has worked over four decades on divorce prediction and marital stability. He is known for his work on marital stability and relationship analysis through scientific direct observations, many of which were published in peer-reviewed literature. The lessons derived from this work represent a partial basis for the relationship counseling movement that aims to improve relationship functioning and the avoidance of those behaviors shown by Gottman and other researchers to harm human relationships. His work has also had a major impact on the development of important concepts on social sequence analysis. He and his wife, psychologist Julie Schwartz Gottman, co-founded and lead a relationship company and therapist training entity called The Gottman Institute. They have also co-founded Affective Software Inc., a program designed to make marriage and relationship counseling methods and resources available to a larger audience.
Sociology of the family is a subfield of the subject of sociology, in which researchers and academics study family structure as a social institution and unit of socialization from various sociological perspectives. It can be seen as an example of patterned social relations and group dynamics.
Relationship education and premarital counseling promote practices and principles of premarital education, relationship resources, relationship restoration, relationship maintenance, and evidence-based marriage education.
Childlessness is the state of not having children. Childlessness may have personal, social or political significance.
Early Head Start is a federally funded community-based program for low-income families with pregnant women, infants, and toddlers up to age 3. It is a program that came out of Head Start. The program was designed in 1994 by an Advisory Committee on Services for Families with Infants and Toddlers formed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. "In addition to providing or linking families with needed services—medical, mental health, nutrition, and education—Early Head Start can provide a place for children to experience consistent, nurturing relationships and stable, ongoing routines."
There is considerable confusion in both Chinese and foreign sources over definitions of urban places and hence considerable variation in estimates of China's urban population.
The traditional family structure in the United States is considered a family support system involving two married individuals providing care and stability for their biological offspring. However, this two-parent, heterosexual, nuclear family has become less prevalent, and nontraditional family forms have become more common. The family is created at birth and establishes ties across generations. Those generations, the extended family of aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins, can hold significant emotional and economic roles for the nuclear family.
Sex education in the United States is taught in two main forms: comprehensive sex education and abstinence-only as part of the Adolescent Family Life Act, or AFLA. Comprehensive sex education is also called abstinence-based, abstinence-plus, abstinence-plus-risk-reduction, and sexual risk reduction sex education. This approach covers abstinence as a choice option, but also informs adolescents about human sexuality, age of consent and the availability of contraception and techniques to avoid contraction of sexually transmitted infections. Every state within the U.S. has a mandated AIDS Education Program.
The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) is a longitudinal birth cohort study of American families. Core aims of the study are to learn about the capabilities and relationships of unmarried parents and how the families and children fare on various health and social measures over time. The FFCWS uses a stratified random sampling technique and an oversample of non-marital births. Baseline data collection ran from 1998 to 2000, featuring interviews with both biological parents shortly after children's births as well as the collection of medical records. Follow-up interviews were conducted when the children were 1, 3, 5, 9, 15, and 22 years old. In addition to parent interviews, the follow-up waves included in-home assessments, child care or teacher questionnaires, and interviews with the child.
Fertility factors are determinants of the number of children that an individual is likely to have. Fertility factors are mostly positive or negative correlations without certain causations.
The Supporting Healthy Marriage Project (SHM) is part of the Healthy Marriage Initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, that was launched in 2003 as "the first large-scale, multisite, multiyear, rigorous test of marriage education programs for low-income married couples". The project is motivated by research that "indicates that married adults and children raised by both parents in stable, low-conflict households do better on a host of outcomes". The evaluation is led by MDRC, in collaboration with Abt Associates and other partners. USASpending.gov reports payments of more than $30 million from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to MDRC for work on the Supporting Healthy Marriage Project from 2009 to 2012.
Obesity and the environment aims to look at the different environmental factors that have been determined by researchers to cause and perpetuate obesity. In 1994, in the United States, the percentage of the adult population that was obese was much lower than it is today. In 1994 the percentage of the population in every state that was obese was less than 20%, but by 2008, only one state still had a percentage obese below 20%, six states had a percentage obese of more than 30% while the rest of the states ranged between 20% and 30%.
Relationships of incarcerated individuals are the familial and romantic relations of individuals in prisons or jails. Although the population of incarcerated men and women is considered quite high in many countries, there is relatively little research on the effects of incarceration on the inmates' social worlds. However, it has been demonstrated that inmate's relationships play a seminal role in their well-being both during and after incarceration, making such research important in improving their overall health, and lowering rates of recidivism.
