Public and Private Families


Book Description

Designed for courses in sociology of the family, this work covers a variety of topics, including: the history of the family; gender and families; class; race and ethnicity; families and the state; family formation; spouses and partners; and domestic violence.




The Marriage-Go-Round


Book Description

In a landmark book that's "intriguing [and] provocative" and presents "an original thesis [to explain] this peculiar paradox—we idealize marriage and yet we’re so bad at it” (The New York Times). Andrew J. Cherlin's three decades of study have shown him that marriage in America is a social and political battlefield in a way that it isn’t in other developed countries. Americans marry and divorce more often and have more live-in partners than Europeans, and gay Americans have more interest in legalizing same-sex marriage. The difference comes from Americans’ embrace of two contradictory cultural ideals: marriage, a formal commitment to share one's life with another; and individualism, which emphasizes personal choice and self-development. Religion and law in America reinforce both of these behavioral poles, fueling turmoil in our family life and heated debate in our public life. Cherlin’s incisive diagnosis is an important contribution to the debate and points the way to slowing down the partnership merry-go-round.




All in the Family


Book Description

All in the Family demonstrates how policymakers employ family across a host of policy areas to achieve their "non-family" goals and the consequences this has for policy stability over time.




Adult Supervision Required


Book Description

Adult Supervision Required considers the contradictory ways in which contemporary American culture has imagined individual autonomy for parents and children. In many ways, today’s parents and children have more freedom than ever before. There is widespread respect for children’s autonomy as distinct individuals, and a broad range of parenting styles are flourishing. Yet it may also be fair to say that there is an unprecedented fear of children’s and parents’ freedom. Dread about Amber Alerts and “stranger danger” have put an end to the unsupervised outdoor play enjoyed by earlier generations of suburban kids. Similarly, fear of bad parenting has not only given rise to a cottage industry of advice books for anxious parents, but has also granted state agencies greater power to police the family. Using popular parenting advice literature as a springboard for a broader sociological analysis of the American family, Markella B. Rutherford explores how our increasingly psychological conception of the family might be jeopardizing our appreciation for parents’ and children’s public lives and civil liberties.




Looseleaf for Public and Private Families: An Introduction


Book Description

Public and Private Families: An Introduction, discusses the family in two senses: the private family, in which we live most of our personal lives, and the public family, in which we, as adults, deal with broader societal issues. The eighth edition of this program examines the history of families around the world while simultaneously introducing the most relevant topics in society such as same sex marriage, self-identification, and the globalization and modernization of families today. The Connect course for this offering includes SmartBook, an adaptive reading and study experience which guides students to master, recall, and apply key concepts while providing automatically-graded assessments. McGraw-Hill Connect® is a subscription-based learning service accessible online through your personal computer or tablet. Choose this option if your instructor will require Connect to be used in the course. Your subscription to Connect includes the following: • SmartBook® - an adaptive digital version of the course textbook that personalizes your reading experience based on how well you are learning the content. • Access to your instructor’s homework assignments, quizzes, syllabus, notes, reminders, and other important files for the course. • Progress dashboards that quickly show how you are performing on your assignments and tips for improvement. • The option to purchase (for a small fee) a print version of the book. This binder-ready, loose-leaf version includes free shipping. Complete system requirements to use Connect can be found here: http://www.mheducation.com/highered/platforms/connect/training-support-students.html




Public and Private Families


Book Description

This reader examines the family through two lenses--the familiar private family, in which we live our personal lives, and the public family, in which we deal with broader societal issues, such as raising the next generation, and the care of the elderly. Consequently, these readings look both at intimate, personal concerns, such as whether to marry, as well as societal concerns, such as governmental policies that affect families. The reader corresponds exactly to and is published concurrent with Cherlin’s textbookPublic and Private Families: An Introduction; both the textbook and the reader have 15 same-named chapters.




Public & Private Families


Book Description

Nationally recognized for its sound scholarship and balanced approach and written by one of the leading authorities in the field, this text examines the family through two lenses: the familiar private family in which we live most of our personal lives, and the public family in which we, as adults, deal with broader societal issues such as the care of the elderly, the increase in divorce, and childbearing outside of marriage. The book looks at intimate personal concerns, such as whether to marry, as well as societal concerns, such as governmental policies that affect families. Distinctive chapters - Chapter 9, Children and Parents; Chapter 10, The Elderly and Their Families; and Chapter 14, The Family, the State and Social Policy - examine issues of great current interest, such as income assistance to poor families, the effects of out-of-home childcare, and the costs of the Social Security and Medicare programs.




House Rules


Book Description

The paradigm of family has shifted rapidly and dramatically, from nuclear unit to diverse constellations of intimacy. At the same time, some norms resist change, such as women’s continuing role as primary care providers despite their increased uptake of paid work. This tension between transformation and stasis in family arrangements has an impact on economic, emotional, and legal aspects of daily life. House Rules critically explores the intertwining of norms and laws that govern familial relationships. The authors in this incisive collection engage with four countries – Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan – and expose the ingrained and unsettled norms that affect families and the law’s role in regulating them. Over recent decades, the law has struggled to adjust to transformations in what typifies the structures and practices of family life. House Rules provides tools to analyze those difficulties and, ultimately, to design laws to better respond to ongoing change and avoid entrenching inequalities.




Family Mobility


Book Description

Family mobility decisions reveal much about how the public and private realms of social life interact and change. This sociological study explores how contemporary families reconcile individual members’ career and education projects within the family unit over time and space, and unpacks the intersubjective constraints on workforce mobility. This Australian mixed methods study sampled Defence Force families and middle class professional families to illustrate how families’ educational projects are necessarily and deeply implicated in issues of workforce mobility and immobility, in complex ways. Defence families move frequently, often absorbing the stresses of moving through ‘viscous’ institutions as private troubles. In contrast, the selective mobility of middle class professional families and their ‘no go zones’ contribute to the public issue of poorly serviced rural communities. Families with different social, material and vocational resources at their disposal are shown to reflexively weigh the benefits and risks associated with moving differently. The book also explore how priorities shift as children move through educational phases. The families’ narratives offer empirical windows on larger social processes, such as the mobility imperative, the gender imbalance in the family’s intersubjective bargains, labour market credentialism, the social construction of place, and the family’s role in the reproduction of class structure.




Family Policy


Book Description

"Family Policy offers concrete illustrative examples that bring the academic subject matter to life for students. Questions at the end of each chapter help students test their comprehension of the material, deepen their understanding of the subject matter, and spur classroom discussion."--BOOK JACKET.