Not-so-nuclear Families

Not-so-nuclear Families
Author: Karen V. Hansen
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2005
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9780813535012

Annotation How do working parents provide care and mobilize the help that they need? Karen V. Hansen investigates the lives of working parents and the informal networks they construct to help care for their children. The book concludes with a series of policy suggestions intended to improve the environment in which working families raise children.

Not-So-Nuclear Families

Not-So-Nuclear Families
Author: Karen V. Hansen
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2004-11-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813557798

In recent years U.S. public policy has focused on strengthening the nuclear family as a primary strategy for improving the lives of America's youth. It is often assumed that this normative type of family is an independent, self-sufficient unit adequate for raising children. But half of all households in the United States with young children have two employed parents. How do working parents provide care and mobilize the help that they need? In Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care, Karen V. Hansen investigates the lives of working parents and the informal networks they construct to help care for their children. She chronicles the conflicts, hardships, and triumphs of four families of various social classes. Each must navigate the ideology that mandates that parents, mothers in particular, rear their own children, in the face of an economic reality that requires that parents rely on the help of others. In vivid family stories, parents detail how they and their networks of friends, paid caregivers, and extended kin collectively close the "care gap" for their school-aged children. Hansen not only debunks the myth that families in the United States are independent, isolated, and self-reliant units, she breaks new theoretical ground by asserting that informal networks of care can potentially provide unique and valuable bonds that nuclear families cannot.

A Nuclear Family

A Nuclear Family
Author: April Naoko Heck
Publisher: Upset Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781937357917

"As we approach the 70-year anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, Heck's timely collection explores the brink of creation and annihilation -- the dawning of the nuclear age and the shaping of Japanese American identity within the shadows of WWII."--Publisher's website.

Family and Civilization

Family and Civilization
Author: Carle C. Zimmerman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2023-05-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 168451617X

In Family and Civilization, the distinguished Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman demonstrates the close and causal connections between the rise and fall of different types of families and the rise and fall of civilizations, particularly ancient Greece and Rome, medieval and modern Europe, and the United States. Zimmerman traces the evolution of family structure from tribes and clans to extended and large nuclear families to the smaller, often broken families of today. And he shows the consequences of each structure for bearing and rearing of children, for religion, law, and everyday life, and for the fate of civilization itself. Originally published in 1947, this compelling analysis predicted many of today's controversies and trends concerning youth violence and depression, abortion, and homosexuality, the demographic collapse of the West, and the displacement of peoples. This new edition has been edited and abridged by James Kurth of Swarthmore College. It includes essays on the text by Kurth and Bryce Christensen and an introduction by Allan C. Carlson.

Nuclear Family

Nuclear Family
Author: Susanna Fogel
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2017-07-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1627797920

From filmmaker and New Yorker contributor Susanna Fogel comes a comedic novel about a fractured family of New England Jews and their discontents, over the course of three decades. Told entirely in letters to a heroine we never meet, we get to know the Fellers through their check-ins with Julie: their thank-you notes, letters of condolence, family gossip, and good old-fashioned familial passive-aggression. Together, their missives – some sardonic, others absurd, others heartbreaking – weave a tapestry of a very modern family trying (and often failing) to show one another they care. The titular “Nuclear Family” includes, among many others: A narcissistic former-child-prodigy father who has taken up haiku writing in his old age and his new wife, a traditional Chinese woman whose attempts to help her stepdaughter find a man include FedExing her silk gowns from Filene’s Basement. Their six-year-old son, Stuart, whose favorite condiment is truffle oil and who wears suits to bed. Julie’s mother, a psychologist who never remarried but may be in love with her arrogant Rabbi and overshares about everything, including the threesome she had with Dutch grad students in 1972.

Subversive Family

Subversive Family
Author: Ferdinand Mount
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2010-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1451603282

British politician and writer, Ferdinand Mount, challenges contemporary beliefs about society and family—including the history of divorce, childcare, and the concept of the nuclear family. In Subversive Family, politician and writer Ferdinand Mount argues that society is shaped by a series of powerful revolutionary movements, the leaders of which, whether they be political ideologues, theologians, feudal lords, or feminist writers, have done their utmost to render the family a subordinate instrument of their purpose but that, in spite of it all, the family endures. Mount maintains that many widely held contemporary beliefs about the family are based on a willful misreading of the evidence: among the myths are that arranged marriages were the norm until this century; that child care is a modern innovation; that in earlier societies children were treated as expendable objects; that the nuclear family is not a 20th-century invention; and that romantic love never existed before the troubador poets glorified adultery. Divorce, he contends, is no great novelty either, he shows that in many times and places it has been almost as easy to obtain as it is today. Far from diminishing the general desire and respect for family life, Mount contends that the provision for divorce has been popularly regarded as an integral part of any sensible system of family law. This study should jolt the reader into a re-assessment of one of the most familiar and ancient institutions, and encourage greater consideration for policies today that support the family.

The Anti-Social Family

The Anti-Social Family
Author: Michele Barrett
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2015-01-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1781687609

Despite much talk of its decline, the nuclear family persists as a structure central to contemporary society, a fact to be lamented, according to the ideas of Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh. The Anti-social Family dissects the network of household, kinship and sexual relations that constitute the family form in advanced capitalist societies to show how they reinforce conditions of inequality. This classic work explores the personal and social needs that the family promises to meet but more often denies, and proposes moral and political practices for more egalitarian caring alternatives.

Nuclear Family Values, Extended Family Lives

Nuclear Family Values, Extended Family Lives
Author: Natalia Sarkisian
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 109
Release: 2012-04-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136497471

Nuclear Family Values, Extended Family Lives shows how the current emphasis on the nuclear family – with its exclusion of the extended family – is narrow, even deleterious, and misses much of family life. This omission is tied to gender, race, and class. This book is broken down into six chapters. Chapter one discusses how, when promoting "family values" and talking about "family as the basic unit of American society," social commentators, politicians, and social scientists alike typically ignore extended kin ties and focus only on the nuclear family. Chapters two and three show that the focus on marriage and the nuclear family is a narrow view that ignores the familial practices and experiences of many Americans – particularly those of women who do much of the work of maintaining kin ties and racial/ethnic minorities for whom extended kin are centrally important. Chapter four focuses on class and economic inequality and explores how an emphasis on the nuclear family may actually promulgate a vision of family life that dismisses the very social resources and community ties that are critical to the survival strategies of those in need. In chapter five, the authors argue that marriage actually detracts from social integration and ties to broader communities. Finally, in chapter six, the authors suggest that the focus on marriage and the nuclear family and the inattention to the extended family distort and reduce the power of social policy in the United States.

A Nuclear Family Vacation

A Nuclear Family Vacation
Author: Nathan Hodge
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2011-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1608196690

In A Nuclear Family Vacation, husband-and-wife journalists Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger hit the road to explore the secretive world of nuclear weaponry. Weaving together first-class travel writing and crack investigative journalism, the pair pursues both adventures and answers: Why are nuclear weapons still on hair-trigger alert? Is there really such a thing as a suitcase nuke? And which nuclear power plants are most likely to be covers for weapons programs? Their itinerary takes them from the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan to the U.S.'s own top-secret "Site R," opening a unique perspective on the world's vast nuclear infrastructure and the international politics at play behind it.

The Nuclear Family

The Nuclear Family
Author: Ari Beser
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015-07-29
Genre: Atomic bomb
ISBN: 9781511482660

"As a child, Ari M. Beser heard stories of his grandfather's dedicated and proud service aboard the two US planes carrying the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. He also heard about a Japanese friend of the family who survived these horrific bombings. Desiring to reconcile these two sides of his family, their history, and their involvement in the war, Beser set out for Japan to meet firsthand with survivors of the atomic devastation. 'The Nuclear Family' tells the story of Ari's grandfathers, the countless Japanese people who suffered and died because of the bombs, and how the use of atomic weapons and nuclear energy continues to affect every single person alive today in ways that we might not understand."--Back cover.