Professor who examines impact of new family forms on child development wins award

Professor Susan Golombok

A Newnham Fellow has won a prestigious British Psychological Society Award for her book which analyses ‘new family forms’ within a context of four decades of empirical research.

Professor Susan Golombok is Professor of Family Research and Director of the Centre for Family Research in Cambridge, a centre known for its focus on family influences on child development, as well as a Professorial Fellow at Newnham.

Her research looks at the impact of new family forms on parenting and child development, specifically lesbian mother families, gay father families, single mothers by choice and families created by assisted reproductive technologies including in vitro fertilisation (IVF), donor insemination, egg donation and surrogacy.

Her most recent book, Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms, has just won a British Psychological Society Book Award in the Academic Monograph category. It was nominated by Cambridge University Press.

Modern Families brings together for the first time the growing body of research into the wide range of family forms, undertaken not just in the UK but also in the USA and around the world.

Most strikingly, these studies show, again and again, that it is the quality of relationships that matters most to the well-being of families, not the number, gender, sexual orientation or genetic relatedness of the parents, or whether the child was conceived with the assistance of reproductive technology.

Professor Daryl O’Connor, Chair of the British Psychological Society  (BPS) Research Board, said:

“It was a great honour to chair the BPS Book Award committee this year. The number, the breadth and standard of submissions were incredibly impressive.

“We were particularly pleased to receive a large number of nominations. As a result, the committee had a difficult and challenging task in choosing the winners. Well done to the winning authors and many congratulations.”

Professor Golombok will be discussing her research at an event, which is open to the public, at Newnham on Saturday, October 15.

The 21st Century Families: What Really Counts? discussion features another high-profile Newnham Fellow, Professor Claire Hughes. She is the Deputy Director of the Centre for Family Research, and the author of the prize-winning Social Understanding and Social Lives and she will discuss the role of family processes on child development.

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