Book review: Parenting Culture Studies

Book review:
Parenting Culture Studies
Ellie Lee, Jennie Bristow, Charlotte Faircloth and Jan Macvarish
School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014
ISBN 978-1-137-30463-6

Community practitioners will recognise that there have been major and controversial changes in child rearing practices over the last 30–40 years. You might say the terrain has become a minefield. The starting point for this insightful and topical book was research conducted a decade ago by author Ellie Lee, which explored an issue practitioners may still struggle to comprehend – why and how infant feeding has become such a controversial and morally charged area of social life.

Simple as science fiction

Human ingenuity and modern technology can make a huge difference to the lives of children and adults with disabilities.

Nursing Times Comments

• Comment on: Hospitals’ duty of care in smoking cessation

• Brid Hehir's comment 19-Jan-2014 4:25 pm
  NICE guidance is all about supporting people to quit which is fine for those who want to. But what about people who don't want to quit -be they patients, visitors or carers? How will their choice be supported? I wrote the attached in an attempt to draw attention to the way in which their rights and choices are being overlooked and/or denied. http://bridhehir.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/this-was-first-published-here-13-nice.html#more

Heart disease halved

NHS communications colleagues struggle to get the media interested in positive health stories. That’s replicated at a national and even international level. It seems the only time the press expresses an interest is when there’s a whiff of a scandal. Bad news sells. That we’re living longer and healthier lives doesn’t.

A mission statement with a difference

On March 3, NHS Change Day, thousands of people in and outside the NHS made a pledge to improve the care given to patients. Roy Lilley, a former NHS chair, listed with pride many of the changes staff had pledged that would make a difference to their working lives and the care they deliver to patients and their families, or act as simple reminders that they were valued. These pledges included: introducing themselves by name, a clothes sale with proceeds being invested in patient care,creating a ‘Harlem shake’ video to break barriers between patients and staff, and many, many more.

Female Genital Mutilation

FGM is declining globally. That’s probably not a headline you’ve seen much of recently, but according to a 2013 UNICEF report ‘the dangerous centuries-old tradition is now on a slow but steady decline in key areas around the world’. What great news that is. But it’s not what we heard on International Day of Zero Tolerance, an annual UN sponsored awareness day, when the European Parliament’s Gender Equality Committee proposed that Europe should toughen its stance against FGM and that ‘cutting’ practitioners should be prosecuted.

Polio-free India. A fantastic achievement

A lasting memory from my recent holiday in India is recalling the pride that people took in telling me that a polio-free subcontinent was expected to be declared by the WHO in February 2014. The world’s largest democracy had gone from being one of the most affected countries in the world – with the last polio case in 2011 – to achieving this monumental feat through public support and conviction, political will and an ambitious public health campaign.