Our first chapter is devoted to asexuality. This may appear a weird choice, as the relationship between asexuality and children is not obvious. However, in our opinion, children and marriage are not choices determined by sexual orientation. As we will shortly see, asexual people are as capable of experiencing love and becoming parents as anyone else.

What is asexuality? Is it a dysfunction, an orientation or a choice? How many people define themselves as ‘asexual’? Can asexual people have a relationship and a family? Can asexual people be (‘good’) parents? What has asexuality to do with families?

It is not...

The termchildfreedescribes women and men who have made a personal decision not to have children. Childfree people define themselves as:

adults who all share at least one common desire: we do not wish to have children of our own. We are teachers, doctors, business owners, authors, computer experts – you name it. We choose to call ourselves ‘childfree’ rather than ‘childless’, because we feel the term ‘childless’ implies that we’re missing something we want – and we aren’t.¹

As we will see later on, the choice to remain childfree is growing: more and more women and men are...

Aliving apart together(LAT) relationship describes a couple, of the same or different gender, who live together but do not share the same home. That is, the term refers to couples, heterosexual or homosexual, married or not, who have an ongoing self-defined couple relationship without cohabiting (Trost, 1998). Partners living in LAT relationships have one household each.

Levin (2004) has suggested that the dual-residence aspect of LAT couples distinguishes them from a commuting (or commuter) marriage,¹ where there is one main household and a second residence that is used when one partner is away. Distance also demarcates LATs from...

Astay-at-home husband(also ‘househusband’) may be defined as a husband that chooses to stay at home instead of working at a career. Astay-at-home father(alternatively, ‘stay-at-home dad’, ‘house dad’, ‘house-spouse’) is a term used to describe a father who is the main carer of the children and is the homemaker of the household.

As we will see in the next section, the number of househusbands and stay-at-home fathers has been gradually increasing, especially in Western nations. Although the role is still subject to many gender stereotypes,¹ and men may have difficulties accessing parenting benefits, communities and services targeted...

The chapter will reflect upon forms and characteristics of lone parenting (also lone parenthood) in Western nations. A lone-parent family usually comprises an adult (a woman or a man) living without a partner and with one or more (dependent) children. The parent not living with a spouse or partner has most of the day-to-day responsibilities in raising the child or children. As we will see later on, the last three decades of the 20th century saw a marked increase in the number of lone mothers and fathers and in the interest in this population by social science researchers. Today, lone...

In this chapter, we examine a selection of research findings on the characteristics, advantages and drawbacks of homosexual and transgender parenting experiences. The phenomenon ofhomosexual parenting(alsohomo-parenthood¹ – a term that includes all those families in which at least one adult who defines him/herself as homosexual is the parent of at least one child (Nadaud, 2002; Gross, 2003) – has for some time now been an emerging reality in many Western societies, above all following the growing visibility of homosexual mothers living with their partners and their children. Homosexual parenting must be observed from several angles. We must...