The State of Families: Law, Policy, and the Meanings of Relationships collects essential readings on the family to examine the multiple forms of contemporary families, the many issues facing families, the policies that regulate families, and how families—and family life—have become politicized. This text explores various dimensions of "the family" and uses a critical approach to understand the historical, cultural, and political constructions of the family. Each section takes different aspects of the family to highlight the intersection of individual experience, structures of inequality—including race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and immigration—and state power. Readings, both original and reprinted from a wide range of experts in the field, show the multiple forms and meanings of family by delving into topics including the traditional ground of motherhood, childhood, and marriage, while also exploring cutting edge research into fatherhood, reproduction, child-free families, and welfare. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the family, The State of Families offers students in the social sciences and professionals working with families new ways to identify how social structure and institutional practice shape individual experience.

On weekday afternoons, dismissal bells signal not just the end of the school day but also the beginning of another important activity: the federally funded after-school programs that offer tutoring, homework help, and basic supervision to millions of American children. Nearly one in four low-income families enroll a child in an after-school program. Beyond sharpening students’ math and reading skills, these programs also have a profound impact on parents. In a surprising turn—especially given the long history of social policies that leave recipients feeling policed, distrusted, and alienated—government-funded after-school programs have quietly become powerful forces for political and civic engagement by shifting power away from bureaucrats and putting it back into the hands of parents. In State of Empowerment Carolyn Barnes uses ethnographic accounts of three organizations to reveal how interacting with government-funded after-school programs can enhance the civic and political lives of low-income citizens.

In an era in which our conception of what constitutes a “normal” family has undergone remarkable changes, questions have arisen regarding the role of the state in “normalizing” families through public policy. In what ways should the law seek to facilitate, or oppose, parenting and child-rearing practices that depart from the “nuclear family” with two heterosexual parents? What should the state's stance be on single parent families, unwed motherhood, or the adoption of children by gay and lesbian parents? How should authority over child rearing and education be divided between parents and the state? And how should the state deal with the inequalities that arise from birthright citizenship? Through critical essays divided into four parts-Adoption, Race, and Public Policy; Education and Parental Authority; Same Sex Families; and Birthright Citizenship-Child, Family, and State considers the philosophical, political, and legal dilemmas that surround these difficult and divisive questions. An invaluable resource in these contentious debates, Child, Family, and State illuminates the moral questions that lie before policymakers and citizens when contemplating the future of children and families.

Did the New Deal save the working class or destroy its ability to struggle for the well-being of all.

Examines the intersection of politics and intergenerational family relations in China from the Qing period to 1949.

In the 1930s, buoyed by the potential of the New Deal, child welfare reformers hoped to formalize and modernize their methods, partly through professional casework but more importantly through the loving care of temporary, substitute families. Today, however, the foster care system is widely criticized for failing the children and families it is intended to help. How did a vision of dignified services become virtually synonymous with the breakup of poor families and a disparaged form of "welfare" that stigmatizes the women who provide it, the children who receive it, and their families? Tracing the evolution of the modern American foster care system from its inception in the 1930s through the 1970s, Catherine Rymph argues that deeply gendered, domestic ideals, implicit assumptions about the relative value of poor children, and the complex public/private nature of American welfare provision fueled the cultural resistance to funding maternal and parental care. What emerged was a system of public social provision that was actually subsidized by foster families themselves, most of whom were concentrated toward the socioeconomic lower half, much like the children they served. Analyzing the ideas, debates, and policies surrounding foster care and foster parents' relationship to public welfare, Rymph reveals the framework for the building of the foster care system and draws out its implications for today's child support networks.

Children, family and the state examines different theories of childhood, children's rights and the relationship between children, parents and the state.