Description

This book offers an in-depth, contemporary, and integrative perspective on one of the most universal yet constantly evolving human realities: the family. Rather than reducing the family to a single or ideal structure, the book explores the diversity of configurations, trajectories, and experiences through which people build belonging, affection, care, responsibility, and continuity across generations. Across five chapters, the book examines the historical and social transformation of contemporary families; the development of emotional bonds, attachment, and emotional security; communication, conflict, and relational repair; as well as the challenges associated with parenting, shared responsibility, childhood, adolescence, and the development of autonomy. It also explores chronic illness, disability, dependency, caregiver burden, and the importance of support networks, before addressing some of the experiences that can most profoundly alter family life: separation, divorce, domestic violence, grief, loss, and migration. The book advances an essential idea: a family’s well-being does not depend on preserving a particular form of family life unchanged, but rather on its ability to respond to the needs of its members, protect without suppressing individuality, care without controlling, provide support without hindering autonomy, and rebuild its bonds when life transforms what once seemed permanent. Families may experience conflict, absence, illness, separation, and crisis, but they can also develop new forms of connection, care, belonging, and continuity. From a relational and deeply human perspective that is sensitive to the social conditions of our time, Contemporary Families: Bonds, Care, and Transformations invites readers to understand that the family is not a finished reality, but an ongoing, everyday construction. Its members, roles, needs, and circumstances may change; nevertheless, the possibility of caring, repairing, supporting, and rebuilding remains. A family is defined not only by its ability to remain the same, but also by its capacity to transform while continuing to recognize itself as a family.

Suggested citation (APA, seventh edition)

Calva-Nagua, D. X. (2026). Contemporary Families: Bonds, Care, and Transformations. Sophia Editions.