This handbook provides a meaningful overview of topical themes within family sociology as an academic field as well as empirical realities in various societal contexts across Europe. More than sixty prominent European scholars¿ original texts present the field¿s main theoretical and methodological approaches in addition to issues such as families as relationships, parental arrangements, parenting practices and child well-being, family policies in welfare state regimes, family lives in migration, and family trajectories. Presenting cutting-edge research on findings, theoretical interpretations, and solutions to methodological challenges, it is a timely tool for researchers, teachers, students, and family practitioners who wish to familiarise themselves with the state of family sociology in Europe.

Offers a touchstone collection of theories, methodologies, and case studies that foreground the specific sociological contexts and contributions of the sociology of the family in Europe

1. Introduction.- 2. The Family of Individuals: An overview of the sociology of family in Europe, 130 years after Durkheim's first university course.- 3. Gender, social class and family relations in different life stages in Europe.- 4. What Law Has Joined: family relations and categories of kinship in the European court of Human rights.- 5. Family demography and values in Europe: Continuity and change.- 6. The configurational approach to families: Methodological suggestions.- 7. Visual Family Research Methods.- 8. Family transformations and sub-replacement fertility in Europe.- 9. Reexamining Degenderization. Changes in Family Policies in Europe.- 10. Familialisation of Care in European Societies. Between family and the state.- 11. Who Benefits from Parental Leave Policies? A Comparison Between Nordic and Southern European Countries.- 12. Family, poverty, and social policy interventions.- 13. Redefining the boundaries of family and personal relationships.- 14. Money in couples: The organisation of finances and the symbolic use of money in couples.- 15. Sibling relationships: being connected and related.- 16. "It's a balance on a knife-edge": Expectations of parents and adult children.- 17. Non-parental childcare in France, Norway, and Spain.- 18. Sharing the caring responsibility between the private and the public: childcare, parental choice, and inequality.- 19. Shared parenting after separation and divorce in Europe in the context of the Second demographic transition.- 20. Subjective well-being of children in the context of family change in Estonia, Poland, and Romania.- 21. Assessment of parental potential. Socioeconomic risk factors and of children's wellbeing.- 22. Towards a 'parenting regime': globalizing tendencies and localised variation.- 23. Migration and families in European society.- 24. The multidimensional nature of family migration: Transnational and mixed families in Europe.- 25. Intergenerational relations in the context of migration: gender roles in the family relationships.- 26. Despite the Distance? Intergenerational Contact in Times of Migration.- 27. Parenting and caring across borders in refugee context.- 28. The contribution of the life-course perspective to the study of family relationships: advances, challenges, and limitations.- 29. Varieties of youth transitions? A review of the comparative literature on the entry to adulthood.- 30. Transitions in later life and the re-configuration of family relationships in the third age: the case of baby boomers.- 31. From taken for granted to taken seriously. The Linked Lives Life Course Principle under Literature Analysis.- 32. Afterthoughts on an "earthquake of changes"