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This paper explores the relationship between education, parenting and family through the prism and particularities of family learning. Family learning is an example of an educational initiative, primarily aimed at parents and linked to wider policy concerns, which can be explored through a mapping of its social geographies; family learning is played out across and productive of different sites, spaces and identities. Based on qualitative research undertaken in West London, this paper draws on individual and group interviews with mothers participating in family learning classes and interviews with family learning providers. The key argument we extend is that focusing on the social geographies of family learning - of home, school, work, community and nation - allows us to see how educational initiatives extend the state's reach in family life, producing particular normative versions of family and 'good' parenting operating at a range of interconnecting scales. Education remains a cornerstone of family policy in the UK and detailed analyses of specific initiatives at the point of implementation - how they are practiced and received - is vital for better understanding their diverse and varied effects in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant research on family migration for education has focused almost exclusively on the education of children. We thus know very little about family migration when it is driven by the educational projects of parents. To begin to redress this gap, this paper explores the experiences of families who have moved to the United Kingdom primarily to enable the mother or father to pursue a degree. It argues that, in common with what we know of UK student-parents, both choices about and experiences of higher education are strongly differentiated by gender. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper maps out 10 risk factors measuring deficits in parent-child interaction, family-child interaction and the home environment. The prevalence of risk factor combinations is quantified using the UK Millennium Cohort Study data. In 2001, 28 per cent of families with young children were facing two or more risk factors at age 9-10 months old. Each combination of multiple risk factors accounted for a very small proportion of all MCS families. Specific risk factors were associated with particular developmental outcomes at age 5 and with changes from age 3 to age 5, but all leading to worse outcomes. The great diversity of risk-factor combinations and their very small prevalence make the tasks of identifying such families and defining eligibility for support very difficult for policy-makers. These results support the large body of policy literature advocating early intervention to improve children's development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social demographic literature on divorce suggests that the lower educated are more likely to have personality traits that reduce relationship stability. However, few empirical verifications of this proposition exist. To fill this void, we look at the distribution of personality traits across educational groups of married individuals in Britain. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (N = 2,665), we first estimated the effects of the “Big Five” personality traits agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience on divorce and subsequently examine their distribution across educational groups. We find that in particular women’s personality traits differ by education. We also observe that personality traits affecting divorce risk are distributed unevenly over educational groups, but they do not favor the higher educated in general. In sum, the data do not support the hypothesis that the lower educated in Britain have personality traits that reduce relationship stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]