Annotation The current child care system in the United States can be described as erratic, inadequate, and stigmatized. In this comprehensive history of American child care policy and practices from the colonial period to the present, Sonya Michel explains why child care has evolved as it has and compares U.S. policy to that of other democratic market societies.
Updated and revised with seven new chapters, a new introduction, and a new resources section, this landmark book is invaluable for women facing a custody battle. It was the first to break the myth that mothers receive preferential treatment over fathers in custody disputes. Although mothers generally retain custody when fathers choose not to fight for it, fathers who seek custody often win—not because the mother is unfit or the father has been the primary caregiver but because, as Phyllis Chesler argues, women are held to a much higher standard of parenting. Incorporating findings from years of research, hundreds of interviews, and international surveys about child-custody arrangements, Chesler argues for new guidelines to resolve custody disputes and to prevent the continued oppression of mothers in custody situations. This book provides a philosophical and psychological perspective as well as practical advice from one of the country’s leading matrimonial lawyers. Both an indictment of a discriminatory system and a call to action over motherhood under siege, Mothers on Trial is essential reading for anyone concerned either personally or professionally with custody rights and the well-being of the children involved.
Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.
Children's rights law is a relatively young but rapidly developing discipline. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, the field's core legal instrument, is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. Yet, like children themselves, children's rights are often relegated to the margins in mainstream legal, political, and other discourses, despite their application to approximately one-third of the world's population and every human being's first stages of life. Now thirty years old, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) signalled a definitive shift in the way that children are viewed and understood--from passive objects subsumed within the family to full human beings with a distinct set of rights. Although the CRC and other children's rights law have spurred positive changes in law, policies, and attitudes toward children in numerous countries, implementation remains a work in progress. We have reached a state in the evolution of children's rights in which we need more critical evaluation and assessment of the CRC and the large body of children's rights law and policy that this treaty has inspired. We have moved from conceptualizing and adopting legislation to focusing on implementation and making the content of children's rights meaningful in the lives of all children. This book provides a critical evaluation and assessment of children's rights law, including the CRC. With contributions from leading scholars and practitioners from around the world, it aims to elucidate the content of children's rights law, explore the complexities of implementation, and identify critical challenges and opportunities for children's rights law.
Most people believe that parents have moral rights and responsibilities regarding their children. These rights and responsibilities undergird the nuclear family and are essential to the flourishing of its members. However, their basis and contents are hotly contested. Do a child's genetic parents have a right to parent her? The importance of genetic ties is affirmed by many people's gut responses, everyday talk, and many court decisions, but the moral justification for tying parenthood rights to genetics is unclear. Parents are routinely permitted to make far-reaching decisions about their children's medical care, education, religious practice, and even how to punish them. When can parental rights be limited by the interests of the child or society? Matters are no more settled when it comes to parental responsibilities. It is commonly thought that if a man conceives a child through voluntary sexual intercourse he acquires parental responsibilities, even if he took every precaution against conception. On the other hand, sperm donors are widely-though not universally-thought to have no responsibilities towards their progeny. What is the basis for these disparate judgments? Parents are expected to do a lot for their children as they raise them. But there are surely limits. Sometimes parents have to balance the needs of multiple family members or just want to have time for themselves. What is the extent of their parental responsibilities? In The Moral Foundations of Parenthood, Joseph Millum provides a philosophical account of moral parenthood. He explains how parental rights and responsibilities are acquired, what those rights and responsibilities consist in, and how parents should go about making decisions on behalf of their children. In doing so, he provides a set of frameworks to help solve pressing ethical dilemmas relating to parents and children.
We like to say that our cities have been shaped by creative destruction the vast powers of capitalism to remake cities. But Marta Gutman shows that other forces played roles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as cities responded to industrialization and the onset of modernity. Gutman focuses on the use and adaptive reuse of everyday buildings, and most tellingly she reveals the determinative roles of women and charitable institutions. In Oakland, Gutman shows, private houses were often adapted for charity work and the betterment of children, in the process becoming critical sites for public life and for the development of sustainable social environments. Gutman makes a strong argument for the centrality of incremental construction and the power of women-run organizations to our understanding of modern cities. "
During World War II, American women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, and many of them relied on federally funded child care programs. At the end of the war, working mothers vigorously protested the termination of child care subsidies. In Citizen, Mother, Worker, Emilie Stoltzfus traces grassroots activism and national and local policy debates concerning public funding of children's day care in the two decades after the end of World War II. Using events in Cleveland, Ohio; Washington, D.C.; and the state of California, Stoltzfus identifies a prevailing belief among postwar policymakers that women could best serve the nation as homemakers. Although federal funding was briefly extended after the end of the war, grassroots campaigns for subsidized day care in Cleveland and Washington met with only limited success. In California, however, mothers asserted their importance to the state's economy as "productive citizens" and won a permanent, state-funded child care program. In addition, by the 1960s, federal child care funding gained new life as an alternative to cash aid for poor single mothers. These debates about the public's stake in what many viewed as a private matter help illuminate America's changing social, political, and fiscal priorities, as well as the meaning of female citizenship in the postwar period.
Those concerned with investigating the political functions of the family far too often identify only one: the production of "good democratic citizens." As a result, public discussion of family law and policy has been confined to a narrow continuum that ignores the family's other, often subversive, political functions.In The Public Family David Herring's goal is to create a new rhetoric that moves beyond the stalemate that often results from the war between advocates of parental rights and those of children's rights. This "rhetoric of associational respect" allows him to constructively address the role of rights and the limits of individualism in political and legal theory. While acknowledging the family's importance in facilitating state functioning and power in a large, pluralistic democracy (the aforementioned production of good citizens), Herring fully explores the ways in which the family produces diversity and promotes tolerance. Unlike other works on the subject, which view the differences between individuals as constituting the central challenge for American society, Herring focuses on the importance of such differences. In doing so, he enriches and enlivens the often divisive public discussion of family law and policy.
Protected Children, Regulated Mothers examines child protection in Stalinist Hungary as a part of twentieth-century (East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern) European history. Across the communist bloc, the increase of residential homes was preferred to the prewar system of foster care. The study challenges the transformation of state care into a tool of totalitarian power. Rather than political repression, educators mostly faced an arsenal of problems related to social and economic transformations following the end of World War II. They continued rather than cut with earlier models of reform and reformatory education. The author’s original research based on hundreds of children’s case files and interviews with institution leaders, teachers, and people formerly in state care demonstrates that child protection was not only to influence the behavior of children but also to regulate especially lone mothers’ entrance to paid work and their sexuality. Children’s homes both reinforced and changed existing patterns of the gendered division of work. A major finding of the book is that child protection had a centuries-long common history with the “solution to the Gypsy question” rooted in efforts towards the erasure of the perceived work-shyness of “Gypsies.”
An incisive, multidisciplinary look at the American family over the past 200 years, written by respected scholars and researchers. Family in America offers two powerful antidotes to popular misconceptions about American family life: historical perspective and scientific objectivity. When we look back at our early history, we discover that the idealized 1950s family—characterized by a rising birthrate, a stable divorce rate, and a declining age of marriage—was a historical aberration, out of line with long-term historical trends. Working mothers, we learn, are not a 20th century invention; most families throughout American history have needed more than one breadwinner. In the exciting new scholarship described here, readers will learn precisely what is new in American family life and what is not, and acquire the perspective they need to appreciate both the genuine improvements and the losses that come with change.
