Parenting in Privilege or Peril

Parenting in Privilege or Peril

Author: Pamela R. Bennett

Publisher: Teachers College Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0807779903

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Is the American dream that exists for the middle class equally available to the working class? Using extensive interviews with parents and a variety of data sources, this book examines how social contexts and culture affect parenting decisions. By analyzing class differences in neighborhoods, schools, and networks, as well as their relationship to mobility-related parenting practices, the authors demonstrate that cultural differences are no match for economic inequalities. They show how middle-class parents have access to social contexts characterized by security, which gives rise to what the authors call “strategic parenting”—a set of practices that allow adolescents to develop the qualities and skills they will use to go off to college and, subsequently, achieve the American dream. Conversely, the contexts of working-class parents are characterized by precarity, giving rise to “defensive parenting”—an almost frantic use of harm-mitigating interventions to protect adolescents from threats to both their well-being and prospects for mobility. This important book calls for a shift in public policy away from trying to change working-class parents to improving the social contexts in which society asks them to raise the next generation. Book Features: An explanation for social class differences in educationally relevant, mobility-related parenting practices that contrasts with the dominant cultural explanation.Research findings that are informed by a variety of data sources, including interview data, survey data, social network data, census data, and crime statistics.Two new parenting concepts—strategic parenting and defensive parenting—that capture how middle-class and working-class parents pursue social mobility for their children.


Love, Money, and Parenting

Love, Money, and Parenting

Author: Matthias Doepke

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-11-03

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 0691210160

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Doepke and Zilibotti investigate how economic forces shape how parents raise their children. They show that in countries with increasing economic inequality, such as the United States, parents push harder to ensure their children have a path to security and success. Economics has transformed the hands-off parenting of the 1960s and '70s into a frantic, overscheduled activity. Growing inequality has also resulted in an increasing 'parenting gap' between richer and poorer families, raising the disturbing prospect of diminished social mobility and fewer opportunities for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The authors discuss how investments in early childhood development and the design of education systems factor into the parenting equation, and how economics can help shape policies that will contribute to the ideal of equal opportunity for all. --From publisher description.


How the Other Half Eats

How the Other Half Eats

Author: Priya Fielding-Singh

Publisher: Little, Brown Spark

Published: 2023-05-02

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780316427258

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A "deeply empathetic" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) "must-read" (Marion Nestle) that "weaves lyrical storytelling and fascinating research into a compelling narrative" (San Francisco Chronicle) to look at dietary differences along class lines and nutritional disparities in America, illuminating exactly how inequality starts on the dinner plate. Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. From her years of field research, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh brings us into the kitchens of dozens of families from varied educational, economic, and ethnoracial backgrounds to explore how--and why--we eat the way we do. We get to know four families intimately: the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class white family just above it; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family. Whether it's worrying about how far pantry provisions can stretch or whether there's enough time to get dinner on the table before soccer practice, all families have unique experiences that reveal their particular dietary constraints and challenges. By diving into the nuances of these families' lives, Fielding-Singh lays bare the limits of efforts narrowly focused on improving families' food access. Instead, she reveals how being rich or poor in America impacts something even more fundamental than the food families can afford: these experiences impact the very meaning of food itself. Packed with lyrical storytelling and groundbreaking research, as well as Fielding-Singh's personal experiences with food as a biracial, South Asian American woman, How the Other Half Eats illuminates exactly how inequality starts on the dinner plate. Once you've taken a seat at tables across America, you'll never think about class, food, and public health the same way again.


Parenting in Privilege Or Peril

Parenting in Privilege Or Peril

Author: Pamela R. Bennett

Publisher:

Published: 2021-10-29

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780807766026

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Is the American dream that exists for the middle class equally available to the working class? Using extensive interviews with parents and a variety of data sources, this book examines how social contexts and culture affect parenting decisions. By analyzing class differences in neighborhoods, schools, and networks, as well as their relationship to mobility-related parenting practices, the authors demonstrate that cultural differences are no match for economic inequalities. They show how middle-class parents have access to social contexts characterized by security, which gives rise to what the authors call "strategic parenting"-- a set of practices that allow adolescents to develop the qualities and skills they will use to go off to college and, subsequently, achieve the American dream. Conversely, the contexts of working-class parents are characterized by precarity, giving rise to "defensive parenting"--an almost frantic use of harm-mitigating interventions to protect adolescents from threats to both their well-being and prospects for mobility. This important book calls for a shift in public policy away from trying to change working-class parents to improving the social contexts in which society asks them to raise the next generation. Book Features: An explanation for social class differences in educationally relevant, mobility-related parenting practices that contrasts with the dominant cultural explanation. Research findings that are informed by a variety of data sources, including interview data, survey data, social network data, census data, and crime statistics. Two new parenting concepts--strategic parenting and defensive parenting--that capture how middle-class and working-class parents pursue social mobility for their children.


The Parent Trap

The Parent Trap

Author: Nate G. Hilger

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-04-04

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0262545942

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How parents have been set up to fail, and why helping them succeed is the key to achieving a fair and prosperous society. A next Big Idea Club nominee. Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers—parents—labor in isolation. If they ask for help, they are made to feel inadequate; there is no centralized organization to represent their interests; and there is virtually nothing spent on research and development to help them achieve their goals. It’s almost as if parents are set up to fail—and the result is lost opportunities that limit children’s success and make us all worse off. In The Parent Trap, Nate Hilger combines cutting-edge social science research, revealing historical case studies, and on-the-ground investigation to recast parenting as the hidden crucible of inequality. Parents are expected not only to care for their children but to help them develop the skills they will need to thrive in today’s socioeconomic reality—but most parents, including even the most caring parents on the planet, are not trained in skill development and lack the resources to get help. How do we fix this? The solution, Hilger argues, is to ask less of parents, not more. America should consider child development a public investment with a monumental payoff. We need a program like Medicare—call it Familycare—to drive this investment. To make it happen, parents need to organize to wield their political power on behalf of children—who will always be the largest bloc of disenfranchised people in this country. The Parent Trap exposes the true costs of our society’s unrealistic expectations around parenting and lays out a profoundly hopeful blueprint for reform.


Work, Parenting and Inequality

Work, Parenting and Inequality

Author: Candace S. Kovacic-Fleischer

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781611638202

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Work, Parenting and Inequality: Workplace Laws and Policies from 1898 to 2018 considers whether laws in the United States make it difficult for people to be employees and parents at the same time. The book covers constitutional law, employment law, social security law, poverty law, discrimination law, disability law, and veterans law in historical context beginning with the 1890s. To do this, the book includes copies of primary sources--reports, bills, laws as originally passed, signing statements, amendments, and bills not passed--and court cases arranged chronologically by topic. Because the book focuses on policies and consequences of laws, it explains how to understand each law before introducing it in statutes and cases. Thus, it is intended that the book be a reference for people in a variety of disciplines.


Halving It All

Halving It All

Author: Francine Deutsch

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2000-04-07

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0674002091

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The best way to have it all--both a full family life and a career--is to halve it all. That's the message of Francine Deutsch's refreshing and humane book, based on extensive interviews with a wide range of couples. Deutsch casts a skeptical eye on the grim story of inequality that has been told since women found themselves working a second shift at home. She brings good news: equality based on shared parenting is possible, and it is emerging all around us. Some white-collar fathers achieve as well as talk about equality, and some blue-collar parents work alternate shifts to ensure that one parent can always be with the children. Using vivid quotations from her interviews, Deutsch tells the story of couples who share parenting equally, and some who don't. The differences between the groups are not in politics, education, or class, but in the way they negotiate the large and small issues--from whose paid job is "important" to who applies the sunscreen. With the majority of mothers in the workforce, parents today have to find ways of sharing the work at home. Rigid ideas of "good mothers" and "good fathers," Deutsch argues, can be transformed into a more flexible reality: the good parent. Halving It All takes the discussion beyond shrill ideological arguments about working mothers and absent fathers. Deutsch shows how, with the best of intentions, people perpetuate inequalities and injustices on the home front, but also, and more important, how they can devise more equal arrangements, out of explicit principles, or simply out of fairness and love.


Families in an Era of Increasing Inequality

Families in an Era of Increasing Inequality

Author: Paul R. Amato

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-10-07

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 3319083082

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The widening gap between the rich and the poor is turning the American dream into an impossibility for many, particularly children and families. And as the children of low-income families grow to adulthood, they have less access to opportunities and resources than their higher-income peers--and increasing odds of repeating the experiences of their parents. Families in an Era of Increasing Inequality probes the complex relations between social inequality and child development and examines possibilities for disrupting these ongoing patterns. Experts across the social sciences track trends in marriage, divorce, employment, and family structure across socioeconomic strata in the U.S. and other developed countries. These family data give readers a deeper understanding of how social class shapes children's paths to adulthood and how those paths continue to diverge over time and into future generations. In addition, contributors critique current policies and programs that have been created to reduce disparities and offer suggestions for more effective alternatives. Among the topics covered: Inequality begins at home: the role of parenting in the diverging destinies of rich and poor children. Inequality begins outside the home: putting parental educational investments into context. How class and family structure impact the transition to adulthood. Dealing with the consequences of changes in family composition. Dynamic models of poverty-related adversity and child outcomes. The diverging destinies of children and what it means for children's lives. As new initiatives are sought to improve the lives of families and children in the short and long term, Families in an Era of Increasing Inequality is a key resource for researchers and practitioners in family studies, social work, health, education, sociology, demography, and psychology.


Unequal Childhoods

Unequal Childhoods

Author: Annette Lareau

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2011-08-02

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 0520271424

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This book is a powerful portrayal of class inequalities in the United States. It contains insightful analysis of the processes through which inequality is reproduced, and it frankly engages with methodological and analytic dilemmas usually glossed over in academic texts.