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Aging populations and changes in health care, household structure, and women’s labor force participation over the last half century have created a “crisis in care”: demand for care of the old and infirm is rapidly growing, while the supply of private care within the family is substantially contracting. And yet despite the adverse effects of the long-term care crisis on the economic security of families and the health of family caregivers, American families have demonstrated little inclination for translating their private care problems into political demands for social policy reform. Caring for Our Own inverts an enduring question of social welfare politics. Rather than asking why the American state, a known laggard in all matters involving social welfare, hasn’t responded to unmet needs by expanding social entitlements, this book asks: Why don’t American families view unmet needs as the basis for demands for new state entitlements? How do traditional beliefs in family responsibility for social welfare persist even in the face of unmet need? The answer, this book argues, lies in a better understanding of how individuals imagine solutions to their social welfare problems and what prevents politicized understandings of social welfare provision from developing into political demand for reform. This book considers the ways in which existing social policies shape the political imagination, reinforcing longstanding values about family responsibility, subverting grievances grounded in notions of social responsibility, and in some rare cases, constructing new models of social provision that transcend existing ideological divisions in American politics.

This book describes a new life stage, encore adulthood, sandwiched between conventional adulthood—traditional careers and childrearing—and conventional old age. A time of varied paths in work, retirement, family care, or civic engagement, this stage is made possible by medical advances and lifestyle changes improving population health and longevity. The encore adult years occur around ages 55 to 75, as Boomers begin to think about second acts. Twenty-first-century life in North America and Europe is changing in remarkable ways—characterized by the book’s four key themes: First are similarities in changes at both ends of adulthood, emerging adulthood and encore adulthood. Both Millennials and Boomers are without scripts for what’s next. Second, these times of rapid social, economic, and technological changes enable people to experiment, opening up opportunities for some to fashion new ways of working and living. Third, opportunities for renewal and heightened risks are unequally distributed; education, class, gender, race, and age expand or narrow life chances and life quality. Fourth is the distinctly gendered life courses of women and men, with financial, physical, and emotional well-being implications. The book is divided into three sections, each representing one of three research, policy, and action agendas: first is recognizing institutional inertia, and the outdatedness of contemporary career, retirement and life-course templates. Second is supporting Boomers’ time-shifting improvisations, their alternative pathways. Third is institutional work, including social innovations in language, customs, and policies opening up varied and customized career, retirement, and life-course paths.

Homeward Bound shows that as family structure becomes more complex, so too does elder care. Existing institutions and legal approaches are not prepared to handle those complexities. As 79 million American Baby Boomers grow older, their diverse family structures mean the burden of care will fall on a different cast of family members than in the past. Our current approaches to elder care are based on an outdated caregiving model that presumes life-long connection between the parents and offspring, with the existence of high internal norm cohesion among family members providing a valuable safety net for caregiving, Single parent and remarried parent families are far more complicated, and point to the need for increased formal support from the religious, medical, legal, and public policy communities. We base our analysis on in-depth, qualitative interviews with surviving grown children and stepchildren whose mother, father, stepparent, or ex-stepparent died. Their stories illustrate the profound ways that the caregiving, mourning, and inheritance process has changed in ways not adequately reflected in formal legal, medical, and religious tools. The solutions center on awareness and preparation: providing more support for individual planning for incapacity and death and, even more importantly, creating legal, political, and social planning for the “graying of America” at a time of increasingly complex familial ties.

Modern Control Theory and the Limits of Criminal Justice updates and extends the authors’ classic general theory of crime (sometimes referred to as “self-control theory”). In Part I, contemporary evidence about the theory is summarized. Research from criminology, psychology, economics, education, and public health substantially supports the lifelong influence of self control as a significant cause of problem behaviors, including delinquency and crime, substance abuse, school problems, many forms of accidents, employment instability, and many poor health outcomes. Contemporary evidence is supportive of the theory’s focus on early socialization for creation of higher levels of self control and other dimensions of the theory, including the roles of self control, age and the generality or versatility of problem behaviors, as well as the connections between self control and later teen and adult problem behaviors. The book provides methodological assessments of research on the theory, contrasting the control theory perspective with other developmental perspectives in criminology. The role of opportunity, the relationship between self and social control theory, and the role of motivation are addressed. In Part II, control theory is taken to be a valid theory and is used to explore the role of criminal sanctions, especially policing and prisons, and policies about immigration, as methods to impact crime. Modern control theory provides an explanation for the general lack of effectiveness of formal, state sanctions on crime and instead provides substantial justification for prevention of delinquency and crime by a focus on childhood. The theory effectively demonstrates the limits of criminal sanctions and the connection between higher levels of self control and positive life-course outcomes.