Poor children live in a particularly dangerous world--an urban world of broken stair railings, of busy streets serving as playgrounds, of lead paint,….

Today's parents have little authority over those others with whom they share the task of raising their children. On the contrary,most parents deal wi….

Television thus illustrates the mixed blessings of technological change in American society. It is a new medium, promising extraordinary benefits: gr….

In brief, we have no explicit family policy but instead have a haphazard patchwork of institutions and programs designed mostly under crisis conditio….

In the past the intrinsic pleasures of parenthood for most American families were increased by the extrinsic economic return thatchildren brought. To….

It is misleading to discuss recent changes in family life without emphasizing the fact that for generations some Americans have had to raise children….

The most important difference between these early American families and our own is that early families constituted economic unitsin which all members….

One current reaction to change in families, for example, is the proposal for more "education for parenthood," on the theory that this training will n….

Within forty years of their arrival in the Plymouth colony, the first white settlers were afraid their children had lost the dedication and religious….

In the end, the fate of children depends on our ability to use technology constructively and carefully. The connection of childrenand technology is n….

Confronted with the unhappy facts of exclusion, we sometimes reassure ourselves by telling stories: the poor boys who made it, theblacks who became a….

We measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up. We have al….

The myth of self-sufficiency blinds us to the workings of other forces in family life. For families are not now, nor were they ever, the self-suffici….

The myth of the self-sufficient individual and of the self-sufficient, protected, and protective familytells us that those who need help are ultimate….

To be sure, changes in American family structure have been fairly continuous since the first European settlements, but today thesechanges seem to be ….

Mothers work outside the home for many reasons; one of them is almost always because their families need their income to live up to their standards f….

Recognizing that family self-sufficiency is a false myth, we also need to acknowledge that all today's families need help in raising children. The pr….

In the early nineteenth century, the doctrine of self-sufficiency came to apply to families as well as individuals.... The familybecame a special pro….

Parents still have primary responsibility for raising children, but they must have the power to do so in ways consistent with their children's needs ….

Despite the long-term reduction in familial roles and functions, we believe that parents are still the world's greatest experts about the needs of th….

For Americans the contradiction between national ideal and social fact required explanation and correction. Ultimately this contradiction did not lea….