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Thursday, December 22, 2011
ON MARRIAGE, NICK CLEGG IS HOPELESSLY OUT OF DATE: David Green
in the Telegraph (UK): Far from being a throwback to the 1950s, recognising marriage in the tax system is desirable because modern couples need the flexibility to divide their work and child-caring responsibilities as they believe best. Today, couples split work and child care in any ratio that works for them. It may be 50/50, or they may choose to reverse roles completely. Perhaps they planned for the man to be the main breadwinner during their child-raising years, but changing market conditions meant that the woman could earn more. Transferrable tax allowances allow couples to create their own unique work-life balance. Nick Clegg's caricature of the 1950s family was popular among radicals of the 1970s, but today his views are held only by conformist intellectuals who have yet to notice how the family has changed. more Labels: children, extended family, government interest in marriage, Marriage, tax policy, United Kingdom Thursday, June 09, 2011
HOW MARRIAGE EQUALITY CAN SAVE THE BLACK FAMILY: Maya Rupert
at The Root: ...In fact, the fight for marriage equality works in tandem with the movement to strengthen the black family. Achieving marriage equality will actually help save the black family. more Labels: beyond marriage, children, cohabitation, culture, extended family, family structure, gay marriage, gay parenting, grandparents, Marriage, parenting, race, single parenting, unmarried parents Friday, March 19, 2010
REPORT FINDS SHIFT TOWARD EXTENDED FAMILIES: NY Times
reports: The extended family is making something of a comeback, thanks to delayed marriage, immigration, and recession-induced job losses and foreclosures that have forced people to double-up under one roof, an analysis of census figures has found. more Labels: culture, economics, extended family, grandparents, race Friday, November 20, 2009
ON BEING A BAD MOTHER: Sandra Tsing Loh
in the Atlantic: ...Baumgardner also allows that Greer’s books may have self-contradictory elements, and I must admit that as a 21st-century reader, I’ve found that they can be choppy and manifesto-like, with off-putting wild generalizations and quasi-magical terminology. (Of course, this can also be said of third-wave feminists’ writings, e.g., Naomi Wolf’s.) Shulamith Firestone deems motherhood “a condition of terminal psychological and social decay, total self-abnegation and physical deterioration.” And Greer veers off in some directions that left me nonplussed (the taste of the menstrual blood of myself or others is something I’m happy to leave to the imagination). But then I turned to her chapter called “Family,” in which she argues that “stem”—or extended, multigenerational—households are inordinately stable; as opposed to today’s two-parent nuclear families, stem homes can never be “broken,” as their success does not “rest on the frail shoulders of two bewildered individuals trying to apply a contradictory blueprint. more Labels: adultery, extended family, Marriage, motherhood Friday, November 06, 2009
THE POST-NUCLEAR FAMILY: Matthew Schmitz
in Public Discourse: A recent profile in the New York Times of the marriage between President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle had a great deal to say about how the Obamas have balanced their desire for public influence and personal privacy. The article had nothing to say about one of the most simple and remarkable facts about the first family: for the first time in recent memory, the family in the White House is not a nuclear family. more Labels: culture, divorce, extended family, family policy Monday, October 19, 2009
THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME: Joel Kotkin
in Newsweek: ...Perhaps nothing will be as surprising about 21st-century America as its settledness. For more than a generation Americans have believed that "spatial mobility" would increase, and, as it did, feed an inexorable trend toward rootlessness and anomie. This vision of social disintegration was perhaps best epitomized in Vance Packard's 1972 bestseller A Nation of Strangers, with its vision of America becoming "a society coming apart at the seams." In 2000, Harvard's Robert Putnam made a similar point, albeit less hyperbolically, in Bowling Alone, in which he wrote about the "civic malaise" he saw gripping the country. In Putnam's view, society was being undermined, largely due to suburbanization and what he called "the growth of mobility." more Labels: culture, extended family |
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