The role the legal process of separation and divorce plays in affecting outcomes for young children and their families was examined in the Collaborative Divorce Project (CDP), an intervention designed to assist the parents of children six years old or younger as they begin the separation /divorce process (married and unmarried couples). Evaluation and outcome data were collected from 161 couples, their attorneys, teachers, and court records. In addition to positive evaluations from both parents, intervention families benefited through lower conflict, greater father involvement, and better outcomes for children than the control group. Attorneys and court records indicate that intervention families were more cooperative and were less likely to need custody evaluations and other costly services. The CDP illustrates how prevention programs can be located within the courts, can be systematically evaluated, and can aid in helping the legal system function optimally for families with young children.
Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) assimilates the philosophies and formal structures of the novel and the moral tale in order to de stabilize the representations of femininity in both forms. Scholars argue that the eponymous heroine models a form of rational, domestic femininity and functions as the work’s moral centre. By examining Belinda’s use of two competing narrative forms, this article finds that Edgeworth debunks the feminine models epitopemized in sentimental novels and didactic fiction by showing the flaws in both philosophies. This viewpoint reveals Belinda not as the novel’s moral centre but as a young woman experimenting with different modes of conduct (troped through narrative form) in order to find her own identity. This essay also reveals a connection between Belinda and Moral Tales for Young People (1801), Edgeworth’s first collection of adolescent novellas, and argues that Edgeworth’s novels should be studied in relation to her children’s fiction and educational manuals.
This essay traces the field of life stage studies, surveying its general trends and its particular impact on our understanding of eighteenth‐century culture. Also known as “life cycle studies,” “life span studies,” or “age studies,” this field has been largely overlooked until recently, but has yielded new insights into identity and literary formations. When aggregated, recent studies show a profound change in how aging was perceived and treated in the eighteenth century as more fluid ideas about three stages of the life cycle – childhood, adolescence, and senescence – gradually became identified not simply by social rituals or external appearance but also by numerical age. Because of its multidisciplinary approach, life stage studies allows us both to recognize this transformation and to connect it to developments in the eighteenth century in the fields of philosophy, law, education, social policy, and literature.
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