“My family eat this money too”: pension sharing and self-respect among Zulu grandmothers

Grandmothers, caregiving, and family functioning.

OBJECTIVES We used McCubbin's Resiliency Model of Family Stress, Adjustment and Adaptation ( McCubbin, Thompson, & McCubbin, 2001) to examine how demographic factors, family stress, grandmother resourcefulness, support, and role reward affect perceptions of family functioning for grandmothers raising grandchildren, grandmothers living in multigenerational households, and grandmothers not caregi...

Throw One's Cake - and Eat It Too

We consider the problem of fairly dividing a heterogeneous cake between a number of players with different tastes. In this setting, it is known that fairness requirements may result in a suboptimal division from the social welfare standpoint. Here, we show that in some cases, discarding some of the cake and fairly dividing only the remainder may be socially preferable to any fair division of th...

O-23: "Caring My Family Integrity"

"Pensando mucho" ("thinking too much"): embodied distress among grandmothers in Nicaraguan transnational families.

In this paper, I describe an embodied form of emotional distress expressed by Nicaraguan grandmothers caring for children of migrant mothers, "pensando mucho" ("thinking too much"). I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured exploratory interviews about pensando mucho conducted with grandmother heads-of-household to show the cultural significance of this complaint within the context o...

This Stranger, My Son

This is the story of how a conventional middle-class American household?a surgeon, his wife and three normal children?had first to recognise, then to cope with and, finally, to exclude, an abnormal family member. Tony was a beautiful child, the eldest, and apart from long hours of screaming for no apparent reason, he seemed a normal baby. His intellectual and motor development was average, but ...