Summarising this study’s findings, this concluding chapter explores a little-discussed and much-maligned text in their light: the relatively late, formally innovative, and greatly enigmatic Rhyming Poem of the Exeter Book. This poem is known for its apparently disorganised structure and ambiguous subject matter, moving rapidly between human and nonhuman referents, and operating on both a microcosmic and macrocosmic level. Yet The Rhyming Poem gains a great deal of clarity when approached as an articulation of a human life course, blurring with that of the world itself. Drawing on arguments built throughout the book, this final chapter sets out a new account of the poem, finding more coherence to its structure than scholars have previously detected, and pointing particularly to key connections between form and content in the poet’s bold use of rhyme to accentuate the sudden shifts and transformations of the life course.

Culture sets the agenda for parenting and defines what being a good parent entails. In this chapter, we review evidence for this point from both the popular literature and from cross-cultural academic research, including our own. Parenting ideas and practices in the United States, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia are described as they relate to the challenges of being a good parent. Particular attention is given to the role of culturally based parental ethnotheories as a basis for action and reflection on oneself as a parent. The chapter concludes with consideration of how current rapid culture change creates new challenges for being a good parent and thus for emotion regulation and a sense of well-being.

This chapter aims to explore the emotional processes associated with parenting stress and competence, as specific risk factors in child maltreatment. We consider two key aspects of the relationship between emotion regulation (ER) and child maltreatment: (1) ER as an important antecedent of child maltreatment and (2) violent parenting behaviors as an ER strategy. The theoretical framework of the social information processing model guides our treatment of the subject. Gender differences and clinical implications are discussed.

Today’s parents are subject to strict rules about how to raise their children. Some rules focus on parents’ emotions: Parents are bound by emotional display rules, according to which “ideal parents” should be “emotionally perfect” – showing positive emotions and refraining from negative ones while interacting with their children. This chapter introduces Lin and colleagues’ pioneering efforts in borrowing the emotional labor framework to shed light on the consequences for parents of their subjection to these emotional display rules. The emotional labor framework, initially proposed by sociologists, holds that employees must consciously align their feelings with emotional display rules when interacting with customers. This framework provides insight into the mechanisms underlying the relation between emotional labor performed by employees and their well-being. This chapter presents the application of the emotional labor framework to the parenting context and outlines future research directions that this approach opens. We believe that extending the emotional labor framework to the context of parenting opens a promising research avenue in the parenting field.

This chapter examines socialist-secularist intellectuals. Secularist intellectuals were noted both for their quick rise within the socialist party, which offered them newspaper editorships and Reichstag candidacies, and for their tendency to heresy. They provided many of the key figures in anarchism, revisionism and radicalism. The first section focuses on how an important oppositional movement of 1890 to 1893, the so-called “revolt of the Jungen” was led by some of the Berlin secularists introduced in Chapter 1. The Jungen have been the subject of a number of reflections on the role of intellectuals in the party; however, none of these has dealt with the secularist dimension of this conflict. By taking up this lacuna, the chapter reinterprets key aspects of the history and the theory of the intellectual. The second section of this chapter shows how Berlin secularists strategically employed heresy as a means of developing their charisma as autonomous intellectuals within the socialist milieu.

The socialist movement had two worldviews, monist materialism a la Ludwig Büchner and dialectical materialism a la Karl Marx. This chapter examines how party leaders and secularist intellectuals theorized the relationship of the two and then looks at the role of popular science in party educational policy. It then moves from the theoretical and policy level to an investigation of the intellectual world of rank-and-file socialists. It opens up new perspectives to explain the well-established fact that workers more happily read works of scientific materialism than the works of Kautsky or Marx. Autobiographical texts are examined to understand why conversion experiences were usually tied to the acceptance of scientific rather than historical materialism. It introduces the role of secularism in the biographies of important socialist leaders, such as Walter Ulbricht, the future leader of the GDR (1949-71). Based on the growing realization that many social groups organized in socialism were attracted to secularist worldview, the chapter will also look at the women’s movement inside the SPD and its particular take on monism.