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This book expands and updates the nuanced historical perspective used in the first edition to understand African American family patterns. The result is a narrative that challenges conventional understanding of the continuing plight of African American families. The book traces the evolution of the black family from slavery to the present, showing the cumulative effects of centuries of historical change. Beginning with a richly researched account of the impact of slavery on black families, the text points out that slavery not only caused extreme instability and suffering for families, but also established a lasting pattern of poverty that made the economic advantages of marriage unattainable for many. The book suggests a prominent role of such policy in constructing the circumstances of black family life. The revised edition updates the final chapters of this study by exploring changes in marriage patterns over time more specifically. In addition, the revised edition gives expanded consideration to the impact on the urban poor of the massive changes in the economy and of mass incarceration. The book demonstrates how each of these changes has operated to dramatically reduce the marriage options of men and women in urban communities.

The book explores the relationship between colonial history and memory from the perspective of middle- class intergenerational relations. Drawing from a prolonged research conducted with Malayali middle classes in Kerala and in the diaspora, the analysis focuses on how specific historical events are retrieved in the present to shape kinship relations and to legitimize trajectories of class mobility. The book bridges historical analysis of gendered family relations as they developed in colonial and postcolonial times with an anthropological inquiry of the symbolic and material premises of kinship among contemporary middle classes. It provides an ethnographically grounded analysis of how middle-class status in contemporary south India is expressed by recalling family histories, and how remembrance shapes kinship ideals, norms, and experiences in domains as different as houses, conjugality, parenthood, reproduction and family size, intergenerational love and genealogical transmission. The book offers original insights on the continuities and differences between colonial and contemporary middle classes, and the role played by migration and diaspora in both contexts. It originally contributes to two interrelated and undertheorized fields within social sciences. Firstly, it addresses the need to develop further our understanding of how gendered kinship and family relations result from and express class belonging. Secondly, it unravels the complex and ambivalent relation between political history, memory, and the ‘private’ domain of family relations.

In the last half-century, radical changes have rippled through the workplace and the home from Boston to Mumbai. In the face of rapid globalization, these changes affect us all, and we can no longer confine ourselves to addressing working and social conditions within our own borders without simultaneously addressing them on a global scale. Based on over 1,000 in-depth interviews and survey data from more than 55,000 families spanning five continents, this book presents the first truly global account of how the changing conditions of work affect us all. It addresses problems faced by working families in industrialized and developing countries alike, touching on issues of child health and development, barriers to parents getting and keeping jobs, problems families confront daily and in times of crisis, and the roles of growing inequalities. Rich in individual stories and deeply human, the book proposes innovative and imaginative ideas for solving the problems of the truly belabored together as a global community.

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.

The norms and expectations of father involvement have changed rapidly within one to two generations. Socially and economically marginalized fathers are being exposed to these messages through popular culture and the media; in state welfare, child protection, and probation offices; in jails, prisons, and post-release programs; and in child support and family courts. Moreover, they are being told that it is up to them to make better choices, to get themselves together, and to be involved fathers. Based on life history interviews with 138 low-income fathers, Black and Keyes show that fathers have internalized these messages and sound determined. After all, there is social worth in fatherhood, hope for creating meaningful lives or new beginnings, the fantasy of leaving something of value behind in the world, and a stake in resisting stigmatizing labels like the deadbeat dad. Most will, however, fall short for several reasons: first, while the expectations for father involvement were increasing, state and economic support for low-income families was decreasing; second, vulnerable fathers often lack viable models to guide them; third, living in dangerous neighborhoods compromises fatherhood and leaves fathers at odds with dominant institutional narratives about being nurturing fathers; and fourth, the dark side of poverty, inscribed on bodies and minds, leaves some struggling with childhood traumas and unhealthy routines to mitigate or numb these painful developmental disruptions. Consequently, the authors assert that without transformative economic, political, and social change that would facilitate and support engaged and nurturing fatherhood, these fathers are being “set up.”

In the past few decades the number of women entering graduate and professional schools has been going up and up, while the number of women reaching the top rung of the corporate and academic worlds has remained relatively stagnant. Why are so many women falling off the fast track? This book traces the career paths of the first generation of ambitious women who started careers in academia, law, medicine, business, and the media in large numbers in the 1970s and '80s. Many women who had started families but continued working had ended up veering off the path to upper management at a point the author calls “the second glass ceiling.” Rather than sticking to their original career goals, they allowed themselves to slide into a second tier of management that offers fewer hours, less pay, lower prestige, and limited upward mobility. Men who did likewise—entered the career world with high aspirations and then started families while working—not only did not show the same trend, they reached even higher levels of professional success than men who had no families at all. Along with her daughter, an aspiring journalist, the author has written a guide for young women who are facing the tough decision of when—and if—to start a family. It is also a guide for older women seeking a second chance to break through to the next level, as the author herself did in academia.

How are families responding to the challenges of parenting young people in the digital age? This book draws on in-depth interviews with families from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds in order to trace the difference that social class makes in how families are making decisions about digital and mobile media use. This book finds that upper income families employ an ethic of expressive empowerment, in which parents encourage their children to use these media in relation to education and self-development and to avoid use that might distract them from goals of achievement. Lower income families, in contrast, embrace an ethic of respectful connectedness, in which family members are encouraged to use digital and mobile media in ways that are respectful, compliant toward parents, and family focused. Each approach has its own benefits and drawbacks, as upper income families are increasingly tempted to employ communication technologies in helicopter and surveillance parenting, and lower income families may use technologies in ways that strengthen interfamilial and neighborhood bonds while inadvertently reinforcing social isolation from other groups. The book challenges the hope that digital and mobile media might assist in bridging cultural and economic divides. It concludes that as U.S. families experience lives that are increasingly isolated from those whose economic circumstances differ from their own, the different roles that digital and mobile media are playing in family lives are reinforcing rather than alleviating what continues to be a troubling economic and social gap in U.S. society.

In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. Drawing on extensive research with parents both rich and poor, parenting toddlers to teenagers, this book reveals how digital technologies give parenting struggles a distinctive character, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent, or support. It argues that, in late modernity, parents are both more burdened with responsibilities and yet increasingly charged with respecting and developing the agency of their child—leaving much to be negotiated. The book charts how parents enact authority and values through digital technologies—as “screen time,” videogames, and social media become ways of both being together and of setting boundaries, with digital technologies introducing valued opportunities and new sources of risk. To light their way, parents comb through the hazy memories of their own childhoods and look toward hard-to-imagine futures. This results in deeply diverse parenting in the present, as parents move between embracing, resisting, or balancing the role of technology in their own and their children’s lives. This book moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative research in the United Kingdom, the book offers conclusions and insights relevant to parents, policymakers, educators, and researchers everywhere.

This book advances the notion that intimate life—marriage and ideas of how to best live—is closely linked to the class in which individuals were raised. Arguing against the notion that class is a meaningless category or that college degrees erase childhood inequalities, this book describes the ways that the class of individuals’ past influences their identities and marriages. Drawing on interview data, the book reveals that not only are adults’ class origins linked to their ideas of who is a desirable spouse, but class origin is also tied to ideas of how to use money, attend to work, engage in leisure, organize time, divide household duties, raise children, and express emotions. Couples in which each partner was raised in a different class must then contend with their different ideas of how to live—ideas that they rarely realize are related to the class of their past.

This is a book about unprecedented families—networks of strangers linked by genes, medical technology, and the human desire for affinity and identity. It chronicles the chain of choices that couples and single mothers make—how to conceive, how to place sperm donors in their family tree, and what to do when it suddenly becomes clear that there are children out there that share half their child’s DNA. Do shared genes make you family? Do children find anything in common? What becomes of the random networks that arise once the members of the families of donor siblings find one another? Based on over 350 interviews with children and parents from all over the United States, Hertz and Nelson explore what it means to children to be a donor sibling and what it’s like to be a parent who discovers four, six, or even a dozen children who share half the DNA of one’s own child. At the heart of their investigation are remarkable relationships woven from tenuous bits of information and fueled by intense curiosity. The authors suggest that donor siblings are expanding the possibilities for extended kinship in the United States.

A remarkable number of women today are taking the daunting step of having children outside of marriage. This book offers a full-scale account of this fast-growing phenomenon, revealing why these middle class women are taking this unorthodox path and how they have managed to make single parenthood work for them. Sixty-five women were interviewed—ranging from physicians and financial analysts to social workers, teachers, and secretaries—who speak candidly about how they manage their lives and families as single mothers. What the research discovers are not ideologues but reluctant revolutionaries, women who—whether straight or gay—struggle to conform to the conventional definitions of mother, child, and family. Having tossed out the rulebook in order to become mothers, they nonetheless adhere to time-honored rules about child-rearing. As they tell their stories, they shed light on their paths to motherhood, describing how they summoned up the courage to pursue their dream, how they broke the news to parents, siblings, friends, and co-workers, how they went about buying sperm from fertility banks or adopting children of different races. They recount how their personal and social histories intersected to enable them to pursue their dream of motherhood, and how they navigate daily life. What does it mean to be “single” in terms of romance and parenting? How do women juggle earning a living with parenting? What creative ways have women devised to shore up these families? How do they incorporate men into their child-centered families? This book provides concrete, informative answers to all these questions.

In digitally connected middle-class households with school-going children, from toddlers through varsity students, the practice of transcendent parenting has arisen. Smartphones and other mobile devices virtually accompany families through all aspects of their everyday existence. The growing sophistication of mobile communication has unleashed a proliferation of apps, channels, and platforms that link parents to their children and key institutions in their lives. Throughout every stage of their children’s development, from infancy to adolescence to emerging adulthood, mobile communication plays an increasingly critical role in family life. Transcendent parenting has emerged in light of significant transformations in the mobile media landscape that allow parents to transcend many realms: the physical distance between them and their children, their children’s offline and online social interaction spaces, as well as timeless time that renders parenting duties ceaseless. In mobile communication, parents parent all over and all of the time, whether their children are by their side or out of sight. Drawing on experiences of urban middle-class families in Asia, this book shows how transcendent parenting embodies and conveys parenting priorities in these households. Paramount are the inculcation of values in their children, oversight of children to protect them from harm, adverse influences, and supporting their children in academic endeavors. It explores how mobile communication allows parents to be more involved than ever in their children’s lives but also questions whether parents have become too involved as a result. It further reflects on the consequences of transcendent parenting for parents’ well-being and children’s personal development.

Billed as an emerging transnational industry, the commercial surrogacy arrangement is more than mere commerce. It involves the birth of kin and relationships that include cross-cultural dialogues and conflicts between forms of reproduction and birthing. The process of making kin is fraught with different forms of negotiations regarding biology, nurture, pregnancy, and parenthood. This book engages with the idea of emerging forms of families and meanings of kinship in a transnational world through ethnographic research, kinship, gender studies, and science and technology studies. The ethnography draws from a context that is enmeshed in the local–global politics of reproduction, and the engaging and ongoing debate regarding ethics and morality in the sphere of reproductive rights. Drawing from conversations with foreign couples coming to India to hire Indian surrogates through Indian fertility clinics, lawmakers, and clinicians, this book looks at the politics of foreign gay couples seeking families through surrogacy in India, identity giving processes to the babies born to foreign couples, the clinicians understanding of kinship, the networks of commerce and agents, and the ways in which the surrogate and her husband positions itself within the arrangement. The mapping of transnational commercial surrogacy in its processual, dynamic representation—from the choice of the arrangement, to the pregnancy and finally to the birth of the child—is done in broad stages. This book aims to present an important ethnographic picture of a complicated, controversial practice such as commercial surrogacy by focusing on its relevance for kinship and our understanding of interpersonal relationships at large.