The Family and Public Policy

In spite of the upset children experience after parental separation, Frank Furstenberg and Andrew Cherlin find that most children adapt successfully as long as their mother does reasonably well financially and psychologically, and as long as conflict between parents is low. The casualty of divorce is usually the declining relationship between fathers and their children.

How does being male or female shape us? And what, aside from obvious anatomical differences, does being male or female mean? In this book, the distinguished psychologist Eleanor Maccoby explores how individuals express their sexual identity at successive periods of their lives. A book about sex in the broadest sense, The Two Sexes seeks to tell us how our development from infancy through adolescence and into adulthood is affected by gender.

This book describes the extraordinary potential that exists in youth mentoring relationships, and discloses the ways in which nonparent adults are uniquely positioned to encourage adolescent development. Yet the book also exposes a rarely acknowledged risk: unsuccessful relationships can actually harm at-risk youth.

In a panoramic study that draws on diverse sources, Jerry A. Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson explain why and how time pressures have emerged and what we can do to alleviate them. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that all Americans are overworked, they show that time itself has become a form of social inequality that is dividing Americans in new ways—between the overworked and the underemployed, women and men, parents and non-parents.

Emphasizing the importance of parental choice, quality of care, and work opportunities, economist Jane Waldfogel guides readers through a maze of social science research evidence to offer comprehensive answers and a vision for change. Drawing on the evidence, Waldfogel proposes a bold new plan to better meet the needs of children in working families, from birth through adolescence, while respecting the core values of choice, quality, and work.

While parents spend significant time as well as money on children, most estimates of the “cost” of children ignore the value of this time. Nancy Folbre provides a startlingly high but entirely credible estimate of the value of parental time per child by asking what it would cost to purchase a comparable substitute for it.