Raising Children Emerging Needs, Modern Risks, and Social Responses

Modern family life raises tough questions: Who should be responsible for children's daily care? How can their financial support be fairly allocated between parents? Should extended family members be paid for their help? Can women have full careers and also be good mothers? In Raising Children, leading scholars take on these questions and more in order to critically assess policy responses to the changing needs of the modern family. As parents struggle to balance professional and personal demands, choose schools for their children, and sort through constantly updated medical and psychological information, they need help from public officials who can make policies that realistically address childrearing's contemporary challenges. The insightful contributions in this volume provide an excellent starting point for understanding these thorny, multifaceted issues, skillfully framing the influences on child development, such as altered family dynamics, major life changes like immigration, and the role of schools and government in children's health. Adoption by same-sex couples, difficulties for immigrant children, the ADHD diagnosis controversy, and public intervention for at-risk children are only a few of the topics covered. With society in a constant state of flux, it is critically important that we assess our family and child policies to ensure that they provide families with the assistance they need. Drawing on the rich interdisciplinary work of the Berkeley Center for Child and Youth Policy, this is an eye-opening look at some of the biggest issues facing the family today, which are as complex as they are vital to address in a thoughtful way.

1 - The Past is Not a Foreign Country: The Historical Education of Policy (Paula Fass)
2 - From Private to Public: Paying Grandparents as Caretakers (Jill Duerr Berrick )
3 - Supporting Fathers' Engagement with Their Kids (Phil Cowan, Carolyn Pape Cowan, Nancy Cohen, Marsha Kline Pruett, and Kyle Pruett)
4 - Can Women Have Careers and Babies Too? (Mary Ann Mason)
5 - Motherhood, Work and Family Policy (Neil Gilbert)
6 - Child Support: How Much is Just Right? (Ira Ellman and Tara Ellman)
7 - Framing Public Interventions with Respect to Children as Parent-Empowering (Stephen D. Sugarman)
8 - Childhood ADHD: Biological Reality or Social Construction, with Policy Implications (Stephen P. Hinshaw)
9 - Do Immigrant Children Have a Fair Chance? (Sylvia Guendelman and Kate Cosby)
10 - Non-Academic Needs of Students: How Can Schools Intervene? (Susan Stone )
11 - Families and Schools Raising Children: The Inequitable Effects of Family Background on Schooling Outcomes (W. Norton Grubb)

Jill Duerr Berrick is Professor and Associat Dean, School of Social Welfare, and Co-Director, Center for Child and Youth Policy, at the University of California-Berkeley. Neil Gilbert is the Chernin Professor of Social Welfare at the University of California-Berkeley.