China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Ideals, negotiations and gender roles in gay and lesbian co-parenting arrangements
Published in Zeynep B. Gürtin, Charlotte Faircloth, Conceiving Contemporary Parenthood, 2020
Despite this expansion of co-parenting arrangements, there is still little research exploring this phenomenon. Current studies have mainly looked at co-parents’ motivations and characteristics, showing that such arrangements are usually pursued in order to avoid what is perceived as the uncertainty surrounding alternative assisted reproductive options such as donor insemination or surrogacy, and to allow the child to have two biological and sexually differentiated parental figures (Segal-Engelchin, Erera and Cwikel 2012; Erera and Segal-Engelchin 2014; Jadva et al. 2015; Herbrand 2017). However, there is a pressing need to understand how these new family forms work in practice, in particular regarding parental experiences and gender dynamics. These family arrangements constitute unique sites of parental experimentations where biological parenthood is created and experienced for itself, separately from romantic or sexual commitments. Co-parenting is all the more interesting given that co-parents benefit from significant leeway to negotiate, implement and manage their family arrangements due to lack of pre-established models and medical or legal procedures to follow.
The Children Act 1989 and Responsibilities for Children’s Medical Treatment
Published in Jo Bridgeman, Medical Treatment of Children and the Law, 2020
Parents have primary responsibility for making decisions about their child’s healthcare and medical treatment. However, as explained in chapter one, the responsibility for making decisions about the medical treatment of a seriously ill child or child with a complex condition, together with the doctors upon whose expertise parent and child rely, is unique in parenting. Both the child and his or her parents depend upon the care of specialists with knowledge and expertise not possessed by parents. Health professionals also have specific legal and professional obligations to the child. They have legal and professional duties to have regard to the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. Consequently, they have public duties to children in their care, which require them, when they have concerns that the child is at risk of significant harm, to inform the local authority, and they have professional duties, when they have concerns about a child’s welfare arising from parental decisions about the child’s medical treatment, to refer these to court for determination. The Children Act concern with both the welfare of the child and the protection of the child from harm is mirrored in the context of the provision of medical treatment to a seriously ill child, when issues of the child’s welfare are removed from the privacy of the home to the public place of the NHS hospital, and where decisions of both parents and doctors about a child’s medical treatment are exposed to scrutiny to ensure compliance with norms of child welfare.
Working with parents
Published in Ruth Chambers, Kirsty Licence, AI Aynsley-Green, Looking after Children in Primary Care, 2018
The definition of parent is wider than biological parent and includes anyone taking responsibility for bringing up a child: step-parent, foster parent and those working with looked after children for a local authority. All cope with similar challenges and all are keen to do the best job they can for the child in their care.
The Influence of Busyness on the Therapeutic Relationship, Nursing Activities and Teamwork: An Ethnography
Published in Comprehensive Child and Adolescent Nursing, 2023
Melinda Simpson-Collins, Margaret Fry, Suzanne Sheppard-Law
Purposive sampling was used to recruit; experienced pediatric nurses, knowledgeable and skilled in the care of pediatric patients, and engaged in the rituals of daily unit-based activities and parents present on the unit. For the purposes of this study, parents were considered key members of this social scene who engaged with clinicians for prolonged periods of time and had a unique perspective of this cultural setting. Parents were defined as the parent that identified themselves as responsible for an infant, child or young person admitted to the pediatric inpatient unit. A sample size of six to ten nurses was considered sufficient to achieve data saturation for both observation and interview data collection techniques (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2019; Van Maanen, 2011). A sample size of six to ten parents were selected to make visible the cultural context of this setting and considered appropriate to achieve data saturation (Byrne 2001; Musante (DeWalt) and DeWalt, 2010).
Emotion as a Signpost in Complicated Pediatric Decision-Making
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
One other example of an MDM encountered in the pediatric setting should be explicitly acknowledged—the young adult patient. Parents (& often healthcare team as well) may be used to treating the young adult as a child, particularly if the medical condition and its treatment have spanned the course of a long relationship. As with all MDM’s, some young adults may want to defer, while others may chafe at their parents’ involvement. It’s also possible that they overtly reject or resent their parents, while at the same time they would be completely lost without that support. Emotions may run high in any family relationship as adolescents and young adults grow in independence, and illness does not make those transitions easier. It is important to remind ourselves as clinicians that we need to listen to these young adults—both their opinions and how they feel—in order to best help them mature as decision-makers. Maturing does not necessarily mean they are on their own; they will develop their individual network of connections and responsibilities within their family and cultural norms, balancing rejecting, accepting, and intermingling all input, as we all do.
Blood is Thicker than Water, or is It? The Possible Role of Stepparents in Pediatric Decision Making
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
Jaan Toelen, Ingrid Boone, Jan Van Bavel, Kris Dierickx
In Belgium, as well as some other European countries, there is no clear legislative statutory for stepparents. Stepparents are not the legal parents of their stepchildren and they do not hold parental responsibilities. They do not have the right to receive medical information on their stepchildren, nor to sign an informed consent document for procedures. Only the legal parents have the authority to do so (Boone 2018). In a clinical context this means that at least formally stepparents cannot be involved in medical decisions and may be left out of any discussion regarding their minor stepchild. This is not the case in all European countries. Some national legal systems allow stepparents to assume parental responsibilities, if certain conditions are met. E.g. English law allows stepparents to acquire parental responsibility for the child through the consent of the legal parents or through a court order (Ferrer-Riba 2016).