Women have left the workforce in droves, and kids are struggling with distance learning since schools were closed nearly one year ago. (Photo/iStock) “School closures place a major institutional constraint on families to cover additional childcare. While the primary function of schools is children’s education, they also provide an expansive infrastructure of care, especially for... Continue Reading →
Does the child support program "make money" for either the federal government or the states? The answer to this question, simply put, is no. Like most other social programs, the child support system provides to families a service that upholds a strong value-system of parents providing for their children, but does so at a direct... Continue Reading →
The fathers' movements ... have obscured the structural basis of the gendered division of labour that supports and sustains women’s greater role in child care, and have turned mothers’ objections into an apparently self-interested, child-harming defence of the status quo. ... In framing the issues as ones of justice, they have also turned to law... Continue Reading →
"...In Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas's analysis of 165 in-depth interviews with single mothers in the same Philadelphia and Camden communities from which we drew many of our fathers, the women had little motivation to stave off early childbearing, as young women in this environs see children as their chief source of meaning and identity,... Continue Reading →
“Like most visions of a “golden age,” the “traditional family” my students describe evaporates on closer examination. It is an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never co-existed in the same time and place. The notion that traditional families fostered intense intimacy between husbands and wives while creating mothers who were totally available... Continue Reading →
Sociological Fragments 