Book Reviews

Date01 June 1998
Published date01 June 1998
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00092
Review Article
294
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
THE PARENTAL OBLIGATION by MAVIS MACLEAN and JOHN
EEKELAAR
(Oxford: Hart Publishing, 1997, 170 pp., £25.00 (hbk.), £13.99 (pbk.))
The Parental Obligation is a theoretical and empirical study of the legal and
social obligations which may be thought to attach to parenthood. Existing
data based on traditional classifications can tell us such things as how many
children are caught up in divorce, how many are born to parents who are
not married to each other, how many single-parent households there are,
and so on. It is the authors’ aim to cut across these rather ‘static’ categories
and explore the extent to which legal and social norms coincide with reality
where children, during the course of their minority, move between
households. This entails the abandonment of accepted categorizations since
the children concerned are moving between these categories, sometimes
more than once. Thus, a child may be born to a married couple who then
divorce. That child may then find himself or herself in a family headed by
a single father or mother who may or may not repartner in or out of
marriage. To take another example, a child may be born to a mother who
is not married to the father – but that mother may herself be married so
that the child would have immediately a social or step-father, or the mother
may not have a partner and may or may not acquire one later. In a minority
of cases, where a parent has serial partnerships, the family picture for the
child may be exceedingly complex.
Maclean and Eekelaar’s concern is with the ‘social capital’ available to
children as they move between households. Is there any reason to believe,
for example, that children born into a marriage, albeit one which later
breaks down, are able to call on more resources, emotional and material,
than those who were born outside marriage? And within that latter group,
can distinctions be drawn between those whose natural parents once
cohabited and those who never did? In order to shed light on these important
questions, which have clear policy implications, the authors conducted, with
the aid of a national survey organization, a survey of some 249 parents.
What these parents had in common was that they were parents who were
at the relevant time living in a separate household from the other natural
parent of their child. This child was known as the ‘study child’ since there
might be siblings or half-siblings and it was not intended that they should
be included in the research. These parents were then divided for the purposes
of the research into three groups. The first group were called the ‘never
togethers’. These were parents who had not lived together at any time since
Book Reviews

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