The transgender literature dealing with couple and family dynamics is limited. Married couples with a transgender partner who wish to remain together have minimal information available and few models about how this type of transition might be negotiated. This qualitative study analyzed fourteen cases of the wives of male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals from Virginia Erhardt‟s 2007 book, Head over Heels: Wives Who Stay with Cross-Dressers and Transsexuals. The authors used thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to identify and organize key themes in the experiences of wives who stayed with MTF transsexual partners. Themes clustered in three main areas: 1) Intrapersonal, 2) Couple Relationship, and 3) Family and Social Relationships. Conclusions from this study and implications for human service professionals are offered.

Supervision is a cornerstone activity in the development of practice skills for human service professionals. Traditionally, supervision is conducted in ways that emphasize the expertise of the supervisor and the need to impart expert wisdom to the supervisee. In many ways, the supervisory relationship often mirrors traditional teacher/student roles contextualized in dominant/subordinate ways of being together. Oversight and monitoring become central activities in such traditional supervisory approaches, which may limit possibilities for growth and development. Critical and feminist perspectives offer other ways of conceptualizing supervision, namely through careful consideration of how power operates and may be used in the supervisory relationship. Intentional reciprocity may be discovered if dominant/subordinate power differentials are re-visioned. This article suggests ways that supervision and supervisory relationships may be (re)considered beyond traditional approaches.

Commuter marriages are characterized by one spouse being resident in the family home, often with work and child-care responsibilities, while the other spouse works and lives away from home for extended periods. This arrangement of family life poses unique challenges for families drawn to the potential benefits of commuting. Commuter marriage entails enormous sacrifices and emotional costs and is not for most families. Still, it may work for others.Long distance commuter marriages are growing in number. Organizing marital and family life around the absence of a spouse is becoming a more familiar part of America's social landscape, making this an opportune time to familiarize readers with the literature in this area, while offering two examples of how commuting has worked for the authors' families. The literature on commuter marriage remains fairly thin, despite strong beginnings twenty years ago. Much relevant data draws from the area of Work and Families and from the corporate world.There are differing motivations for commuting. Commuters having a short or limited time-line for commuting may accept it as part of occupation, or feel that enduring the short term stress and disruption of commuting may bring long term benefits. These benefits include possible advancement, acquiring new skills, recognition as a loyal team player, or even the attractiveness of a temporary change in routine or locale. Receiving emotional support and encouragement from friends, family or colleagues, with office work, child care, and home maintenance are also easier to come by when the need is of limited duration. This regimen of commuting is easier to explain to children and negotiate with one's spouse.Long term commuters may be motivated by other factors. Wanting to stay in one's occupation or profession when work is not readily available is a strong motivator, particularly when work is unavailable locally or available employment involves a lower salary. Leveraging commuting into quality of life issue may be another motivator. For example, commuters working in New York or Boston during the week but live in Up-State New York, Western Massachusetts or rural New England, often stress quality of life issues for families, noting that purchasing power is increased by residential choices. Family relationships surely suffer the emotional and logistical dislocations of long distance commuting yet the commuting spouse remains in a readily accessible regional orbit.Longer distance open-ended commutes are most difficult. Visits home for the commuting spouse take longer, entail more expense, and are of shorter frequency and duration. These types of commuter marriages are hardest on the emotional bonds, routines and intimacy of couples. Such commutes are also hardest on children, pressing one parent into a super parent role while the other parent struggles to make parenting real to children. Commuters in this category, like regional commuters, tend to have a strong identification with careers and derive a strong sense of satisfaction from them. The opportunity to work for extended periods on assignments or projects without the interruption of family life is often satisfying to such individuals. Association with professional colleagues and independence in scheduling time is also a plus, as is personal freedom and their own environment. These considerations clash directly with the values associated with being part of a family, and it not surprising that such relationships work best when couples are enjoying an empty nest. The most successful commuters are those that can, like single residence dual career couples, compartmentalize work and family life (Franklin & Ramage, 1999; Schnittger & Bird, 1990). Commuters who tend to meld work and family together have the hardest time with commuting. Neither offers much to children or the remaining spouse with the emotional dislocations of commuting. …

IntroductionWhile much attention has been focused on moving families beyond welfare, little attention has been given to the destination of many of those families. Research indicates that far from achieving self sufficiency, many join the ranks of the working poor. This group has been an omnipresent but invisible part of the American workforce. This lack of visibility has been based on the assumption that working poverty was a temporary situation (Shulman, 2004) which will be rectified as the worker gains in experience and seniority. For many workers this was not the case, since a variety of structural and individual factors prevent such advancement. This was particularly true with respect to rural areas where infrastructural and employment issues can thwart all but the most thoughtful intervention attempts.Who are the Working Poor?While various definitions have been used to classify the working poor, their numbers, by any definition are surprising. In 2003, 20% of the nation's poor were individuals who worked for at least 27 weeks of the year. And, of that number, three in every five worked full time (U.S. Department of Labor, 2005). One third of children born to working families are part of low income families (Kahne, 2004). Those numbered among the working poor span all races/ethnicities but those of African or Latino descent are more than twice as likely as Whites to be among the working poor (U.S. Department of Labor, 2005). Shulman (2004) offers an excellent description of this population:They are all around us in jobs essential to our lives. Low wage workers are security guards and childcare givers. They are nursing home workers and retail clerks. They are hospital orderlies and teacher's assistants. They are hotel workers and pharmacy technicians. They bone the chicken that we eat, clean the office buildings where we and handle our questions and complaints at call centers. (p. 21)While some of these employment options require education or training beyond high school, that training does not always translate into higher wages (Blalock, Tiller, & Monroe, 2004).Why Does the Working Poor Population Continue to Grow?The number of Americans who comprise the working poor has risen over the past and continues to grow (Kim, 1998). A variety of reasons have been advanced to explain this increase. Changes in employment structure, including the loss of high wage manufacturing jobs has limited the opportunities available for those without advanced degrees (Gringeri, 2001). The restructuring of the welfare system was among the most important factors in the rise of the working poor population. This restructuring has forced former and current welfare recipients, with limited education and training into the low wage job market where jobs provide few, if any, benefits, and little if any opportunity for advancement (Whitener, Gibbs, & Kusmin, 2003). While the stated intent of this strategy was to get people into the force so that they could work their way up, that scenario rarely occurs due to structural factors beyond the control of the worker (Whitener et al., 2003). The failure of the minimum wage to keep pace with the cost of living has made salaries earned in low wage jobs less valuable in the marketplace (Kahne, 2000; Spriggs, 2006).Low wages are among the chief reasons that workers remain among the working poor and this was never truer than among residents of rural areas (Kahne, 2004; Kim, 1998). For those living in rural areas, wages are often significantly lower than wages received in more urban areas (Gringeri, 2001). Kahne's (2004) on low-wage, single mothers reveals that those working for $6 per hour, which is above the federal minimum wage, could not earn a salary above the poverty level for a family of two. Yet these low wage workers up the core of much of the new economy. And it was estimated that low wage jobs will make up 30% of the economy by the end of the decade (Shulman, 2004, p. …

The thesis of this paper is that the social identity formed by many of our ethnic minority children, youth, and families is the consequence of being identified as a member of a negatively defined social group. Ethnicity is conceptualized as having a common origin, or culture, that is handed down from one generation to another. One's ethnic identity is based on a mixture of language, religion, race, and or ancestry (Yinger, 1985). The concept of minority is a sociological term referring to dominance or power relationships. Minority groups are said to have unequal or limited access to power in a society (Mindel, Habenstein, & Wright, 1988). Inequality and limited access become dimensions of social identity as members of ethnic minority groups are singled out, labeled, and treated unequally on the basis of their cultural or physical differences from the dominant group.Van Dijk (1993), focusing on discourse analysis and understanding ethnic and racial inequality in society, has studied the ways majority group members write and talk about minorities in everyday conversations, textbooks, news reports, films, jokes, debates, and in academic and corporate discourse. In his analysis (see van Dijk, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1991), he asked: a) How do members or institutions of dominant white groups describe ethnic or racial minorities?; and b) What role do these descriptions play in the development, strengthening, legitimization, and perpetuation of white group dominance? Discourse analysis contributes to the understanding of what takes place the micro level of social practices, involving the enactment and reproduction of intergroup relations and especially prejudice and ethnic stereotyping (van Dijk, 1993:93).In the everyday discourse of activities, ethnic minority individuals are often reminded of their unequal status in society by textbooks read, news heard, conversations overheard, research findings reported, and a number of other sources of information. To be a member of an ethnic minority group is to engage in battle with the forces of negative social identity.As it now stands, much of our knowledge about ethnic minority families is grounded in theories of structure and function, as described by Kingsbury and Scanzoni (1993). Families and society are interacting systems. Families contribute members to society for the workforce. They socialize children and make them productive members of society. However, when families vary substantially from the realm of the familiar and acceptable norms as they make their contributions to society and interact with other systems, they are seen as systems. Dysfunctional systems have negative social identities.Social science is quick to investigate that which is deviant or dysfunctional and make recommendations that are heavily intertwined with, and gain acceptability from, prevalent cultural stereotypes. Comparative studies of race and ethnicity can be questioned on methodological grounds. According to Ragin and Hein (1993), data collected are often truncated and biased, giving the appearance of scholarship but having little methodological substance. The fundamental utility of this kind of research for ethnic minority groups is highly questionable.According to Marger (1991), since the 1920s, research on American ethnic minority families has focused its attention on relations among majority and ethnic minority groups, using a comparative or cross societal framework. The poor and powerless were often compared with others more fortunate (Billingsley, 1970). It is not very different today. For example, there is profuse interest in at risk conditions of ethnic minority children. Risk factors are identified by a comparative mode of isolating conditions thought to impact the developing child. Social scientists have neglected to consider sufficiently the processes within specific contexts that shape social identity as members of ethnic minority groups. …