This free monthly bulletin will keep you up-to-date with our projects and provides a listing of the most recent research and policy news concerning relationships and families.

You can visit iCOR - the online Information Centre on Relationships anytime for a regularly updated news board, conference listing, research and statistics on a wide range of topics and an online library of research papers from the field. If you would like copies of the iCOR leaflet please email ld@oneplusone.org.uk with your postal address and number of copies required.

One Plus One will be holding a seminar on Tuesday 24th November 2009. Professor Sally Sheldon from Kent Law School will be presenting on the current and changing law regarding family and parenting, including the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 and the sexual family:
Rewriting Parenthood: Reproductive Technologies and the Sexual Family
“Reproductive technologies have a well rehearsed ability to confuse and disrupt our understandings of parenthood.  In this paper, I seek critically to analyse the parenthood provisions of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 Act, assessing both the innovations introduced in that statute and what was retained from the 1990 Act of the same name.  While the 2008 Act has been attacked as dangerous and radical, as offering a ‘lego-kit model of family life’ and a ‘magical mystery tour’ in how legal fatherhood is determined, I describe what the new legislation also owes to deep-rooted, highly traditional assumptions about what a family ‘looks like’.  I aim also to track how far law’s adherence to what Martha Fineman has called a ‘sexual family’ model (a heterosexual couple, joined through a formally celebrated union, living with genetically related offspring) can be maintained in a context where this understanding of the family appears to be becoming unmoored from its traditional underpinnings in the heterosexual couple.  In this light, I attempt to track some of the tensions created in these legal principles by attempts to stretch this model to accommodate family forms which fall out with its previous boundaries.  Further, I wish also to assess what fell beyond the limits of these discussions, to question what was simply unthinkable to the legislature, what possibilities were ignored in this process and why did they go unconsidered? 
* In this presentation, I draw on ongoing research which I am carrying out with Julie McCandless (Oxford Brookes Law School).”

The seminar will be held at One Plus One between 5pm and 6pm. If you are interested and would like to attend please contact ld@oneplusone.org.uk as soon as possible.

Director of One Plus One Penny Mansfield and Head of Practice Development, Jan Mitcheson, will be presenting a workshop entitled Supporting couple relationships at the forthcoming Family and Parenting Institute Conference Policies for Families ... Changes and Choices on the 30th November. The workshop will consider the following issues:

"There is now compelling evidence that how parents get on - or don’t get on - influences children’s lives, affecting the health and wellbeing of the family. We know poor quality parental relationships, whether parents are living together or not, can result in poor parenting and poor quality parent-child interactions with associated risks for social, emotional and educational outcomes for children.

We will present research findings from two important reviews and outline the reasons why we must focus on supporting the parental relationship if outcomes for children are to be improved. The workshop will be participative and encourage you to consider what happens when relationships break down and who might be most at risk, as well as how to spot the early signs of relationship distress. There will also be an opportunity for you to try out some of the innovative resources developed by One Plus One, that can be used with parents to support and protect the couple relationship."

For more information about the conference click here.

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