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"NO SMALL MATTER" is the first feature documentary to explore the most overlooked, underestimated, and powerful force for good in America today: early childhood education. Through poignant stories and surprising...

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"NO SMALL MATTER" is the first feature documentary to explore the most overlooked, underestimated, and powerful force for good in America today: early childhood education. Through poignant stories and surprising...

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"NO SMALL MATTER" is the first feature documentary to explore the most overlooked, underestimated, and powerful force for good in America today: early childhood education. Through poignant stories and surprising...

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"NO SMALL MATTER" is the first feature documentary to explore the most overlooked, underestimated, and powerful force for good in America today: early childhood education. Through poignant stories and surprising...

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Inspired by the groundbreaking book of the same name by Monique W. Morris, Ed.D, PUSHOUT: THE CRIMINALIZATION OF BLACK GIRLS IN SCHOOLS takes a deep dive into the lives of Black girls and the practices, cultural beliefs and policies that disrupt one of the most important factors in their lives - education. Alarmingly, African American girls are the fastest-growing population in the juvenile justice system and the only group of girls to disproportionately experience criminalization at every education level.

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Inspired by the groundbreaking book of the same name by Monique W. Morris, Ed.D, PUSHOUT: THE CRIMINALIZATION OF BLACK GIRLS IN SCHOOLS takes a deep dive into the lives of Black girls and the practices, cultural beliefs and...

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pushout: the criminalization of black girls in schools

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Pushout: the Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

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Inspired by the groundbreaking book of the same name by Monique W. Morris, Ed.D, PUSHOUT: THE CRIMINALIZATION OF BLACK GIRLS IN SCHOOLS takes a deep dive into the lives of Black girls and the practices, cultural beliefs and...

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Inherited from Maria Montessori in 1907, the Montessori Method is a child-centered educational approach celebrating and nurturing each child's desire to learn aEU" an approach valuing the human spirit and full child...

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Inherited from Maria Montessori in 1907, the Montessori Method is a child-centered educational approach celebrating and nurturing each child's desire to learn aEU" an approach valuing the human spirit and full child...

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Mother Nature’s Child Growing Outdoors in the Media Age 

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Mother Nature’s Child Growing Outdoors in the Media Age 

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Mother Nature's Child marks a moment in time when a living generation can still recall childhoods of free outdoor play. This will not be true for most children growing up today. Contemporary culture has undergone drastic change in the last three decades, forcing children indoors where they increasingly exhibit symptoms of "nature deficit": obesity, depression, and a range of learning disorders. Mother Nature's Child explores the various ways that time in nature promotes children's well-being, contributes to the future of the planet, and nourishes the human spirit.

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Mother Nature's Child marks a moment in time when a living generation can still recall childhoods of free outdoor play. This will not be true for most children growing up today. Contemporary culture has undergone drastic...

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Mother Nature's Child marks a moment in time when a living generation can still recall childhoods of free outdoor play. This will not be true for most children growing up today. Contemporary culture has undergone drastic...

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Coming of Age in Jim Crow Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life

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Coming of Age in Jim Crow Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life

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Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life (NYU Press, 2019) by Paula C. Austin, an Assistant Professor of history at Boston University, is not only a history of black youth in Washington D.C. in the 1930s but also a history of social science thought as illustrated in the work of scholars such as sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and William H. Jones. Austin juxtaposes the interior lives of black youth, who she posits as “thinkers, theorists, and critics,” with the ideas of well-known intellectuals to tell a multifaceted history of the Jim Crow era in the nation’s capital. This is a concise monograph that utilizes some recognizable sources in intellectual history, including Frazier’s studies on black families, while also considering the thoughts and ideas of everyday people who were interviewed by experts during the New Negro era. Austin draws upon the methodologies of slavery studies, post-colonial theory, labor history and women’s studies in an attempt to challenge the “limiting boundaries of intellectual history” by illustrating the role that ideas played in the lives of everyday people who navigated “structural impediments” and made a world that reveals a rich cultural and intellectual life. This text is a work of intellectual and social history that is interdisciplinary in scope as structured around four concise chapters. Chapter One focuses on Howard University’s Sociology Department, Chapter Two focuses on race and space, and Chapter Three discusses the political ideas expressed by black youth. Finally, Chapter Four concerns race, gender, and sexuality as well as recreation/leisure time in the lives of black youth in D.C. Austin traverses several modes of inquiry in her narrative including African American history, women’s history, youth studies, and urban history. She does this by making the lives of black children and youths the core of her narrative while considering the history of African Americans, more generally, in the New Negro era and paying critical attention to concerns about gender, race, and space. In this text, Austin reveals how black youth in Jim Crow era D.C. were possessed of both an interior life and an intellectual life. Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC is an important contribution in American intellectual history.

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Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life (NYU Press, 2019) by Paula C. Austin, an Assistant Professor of history at Boston University, is not only a history of black youth in Washington D.C. in the 1930s but also a history of social science thought as illustrated in the work of scholars such as sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and William H. Jones. Austin juxtaposes the interior lives of black youth, who she posits as "thinkers, theorists, and critics," with the ideas of well-known intellectuals to tell a multifaceted history of the Jim Crow era in the nation's capital. This is a concise monograph that utilizes some recognizable sources in intellectual history, including Frazier's studies on black families, while also considering the thoughts and ideas of everyday people who were interviewed by experts during the New Negro era. Austin draws upon the methodologies of slavery studies, post-colonial theory, labor history and women's studies in an attempt to challenge the "limiting boundaries of intellectual history" by illustrating the role that ideas played in the lives of everyday people who navigated "structural impediments" and made a world that reveals a rich cultural and intellectual life. This text is a work of intellectual and social history that is interdisciplinary in scope as structured around four concise chapters. Chapter One focuses on Howard University's Sociology Department, Chapter Two focuses on race and space, and Chapter Three discusses the political ideas expressed by black youth. Finally, Chapter Four concerns race, gender, and sexuality as well as recreation/leisure time in the lives of black youth in D.C. Austin traverses several modes of inquiry in her narrative including African American history, women's history, youth studies, and urban history. She does this by making the lives of black children and youths the core of her narrative while considering the history of African Americans, more generally, in the New Negro era and paying critical attention to concerns about gender, race, and space. In this text, Austin reveals how black youth in Jim Crow era D.C. were possessed of both an interior life and an intellectual life. Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC is an important contribution in American intellectual history.Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). You can follow Dr. Williams on Twitter @DrHettie2017.

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Paula C. Austin, "Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the...

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Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life (NYU Press, 2019) by Paula C. Austin, an Assistant Professor of history at Boston University, is not only a history of black youth in Washington D.C. in the 1930s but also a history of social science thought as illustrated in the work of scholars such as sociologists E.

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Down the Up StaircaseThree Generations of a Harlem Family

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Down the Up StaircaseThree Generations of a Harlem Family

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Public scholarship takes many forms, from op-eds to activism to blog posts. In their new book, Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family (Columbia University Press, 2017), Associate Professor Bruce Haynes and freelance writer, developmental editor, and educator Syma Solovitch (both co-authors and a married couple) use a "sociological memoir" to show a variety of social science concepts in the fields of urban studies, social class, and race. The subject is Haynes's family, whose members were at the heart of several key events, periods, and organizations in African American life in the twentieth century. His grandfather was a leading scholar of the Great Migration and founded the National Urban League, while his grandmother was a noted children's book author of the Harlem Renaissance. The couple became members of the new black Harlem. His parents, who made great sacrifices, such as the gradual deterioration of their house, to send their three sons to private school, resembled the tenuous position African Americans held in the middle class. And Haynes and his brothers came of age in an equally exciting and dangerous period in New York City's history: the turbulence of the 60s, decline of the 70s, and devastation of the 80s. Interweaving a variety of sociological concepts and historical examinations with intimate portraits of this singular family, Down the Up Staircase takes readers on an entertaining and provocative tour of twentieth-century urban America.

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Public scholarship takes many forms, from op-eds to activism to blog posts. In their new book,Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family (Columbia University Press, 2017), Associate Professor Bruce Haynes and freelance writer, developmental editor, and educator Syma Solovitch (both co-authors and a married couple) use a "sociological memoir" to show a variety of social science concepts in the fields of urban studies, social class, and race. The subject is Haynes's family, whose members were at the heart of several key events, periods, and organizations in African American life in the twentieth century. His grandfather was a leading scholar of the Great Migration and founded the National Urban League, while his grandmother was a noted children's book author of the Harlem Renaissance. The couple became members of the new black Harlem. His parents, who made great sacrifices, such as the gradual deterioration of their house, to send their three sons to private school, resembled the tenuous position African Americans held in the middle class. And Haynes and his brothers came of age in an equally exciting and dangerous period in New York City's history: the turbulence of the 60s, decline of the 70s, and devastation of the 80s. Interweaving a variety of sociological concepts and historical examinations with intimate portraits of this singular family, Down the Up Staircase takes readers on an entertaining and provocative tour of twentieth-century urban America.Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge; 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.

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Bruce D. Haynes and Syma Solovitch, "Down the Up Staircase: Three...

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Public scholarship takes many forms, from op-eds to activism to blog posts. In their new book,Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family (Columbia University Press, 2017), Associate Professor Bruce Haynes and freelance writer, developmental editor, and educator Syma Solovitch (both co-authors and a married couple) use a "sociological memoir" to show a variety of social science concepts in the fields of urban studies, social class, and race.

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From Playgrounds to PlayStationThe Interaction of Technology and Play

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From Playgrounds to PlayStationThe Interaction of Technology and Play

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Carroll Pursell's From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of Technology and Play (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) explores how play reflects and drives the evolution of American culture. Pursell engagingly examines the ways in which technology affects play and play shapes people. The objects that children (and adults) play with and play on, along with their games and the hobbies they pursue, can reinforce but also challenge gender roles and cultural norms. Inventors who often talk about "playing" at their work, as if motivated by the pure fun of invention have used new materials and technologies to reshape sports and gameplay, sometimes even crafting new, extreme forms of recreation, but always responding to popular demand. Drawing from a range of sources, including scholarly monographs, patent records, newspapers, and popular and technical journals, the book covers numerous modes and sites of play.

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Carroll Pursell's From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of Technology and Play (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) explores how play reflects and drives the evolution of American culture. Pursell engagingly examines the ways in which technology affects play and play shapes people. The objects that children (and adults) play with and play on, along with their games and the hobbies they pursue, can reinforce but also challenge gender roles and cultural norms. Inventors who often talk about "playing" at their work, as if motivated by the pure fun of invention have used new materials and technologies to reshape sports and gameplay, sometimes even crafting new, extreme forms of recreation, but always responding to popular demand. Drawing from a range of sources, including scholarly monographs, patent records, newspapers, and popular and technical journals, the book covers numerous modes and sites of play. Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She's also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida's Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18

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Carroll Pursell, "From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of...

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Carroll Pursell's From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of Technology and Play (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) explores how play reflects and drives the evolution of American culture. Pursell engagingly examines the ways in which technology affects play and play shapes people.

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Robert Putnam, Our KidsThe American Dream in Crisis

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Robert Putnam, Our KidsThe American Dream in Crisis

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Robert Putnam is the author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon and Schuster, 2015). Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. He has written fourteen books including the best-seller, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Few political scientists command attention like Robert Putnam. For that reason, scholars and the wider public are eager for his take on our current state of affairs. His latest book, Our Kids, paints a grim picture of US life in the twentieth century. The social mobility that Putnam associates with his childhood growing up in Ohio is largely gone, replaced by deep income inequality and increasingly rigid class boundaries. Putnam demonstrates this with a combination of individual stories and supporting social science evidence all that point to education (or inadequate education) as the key determining factor. But in the end Putnam is not a pessimist, instead he sees opportunities for social change. The book ends with a series of recommendations, most non-political, but all aimed to address the country's mobility problem.

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Robert Putnam

Mar 23, 2015

The American Dream in Crisis

Simon and Schuster 2015

Robert Putnam is the author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon and Schuster, 2015). Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. He has written fourteen books including the best-seller, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Few political scientists command attention like Robert Putnam. For that reason, scholars and the wider public are eager for his take on our current state of affairs. His latest book, Our Kids, paints a grim picture of US life in the twentieth century. The social mobility that Putnam associates with his childhood growing up in Ohio is largely gone, replaced by deep income inequality and increasingly rigid class boundaries. Putnam demonstrates this with a combination of individual stories and supporting social science evidence all that point to education (or inadequate education) as the key determining factor. But in the end Putnam is not a pessimist, instead he sees opportunities for social change. The book ends with a series of recommendations, most non-political, but all aimed to address the country's mobility problem.

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Robert Putnam, "Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis" (Simon and...

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Robert Putnam Mar 23, 2015 Robert Putnam is the author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon and Schuster, 2015). Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. He has written fourteen books including the best-seller, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

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Podcast: Sarah Bracey White,  Primary Lessons - A Memoir

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Podcast: Sarah Bracey White,  Primary Lessons - A Memoir

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As an African-American child growing up in the segregated pre-Civil Rights South, Sarah Bracey White pushed against the social conventions that warned her not to rock the boat, even before she was old enough to fully understand her urge to defy the status quo. In her candid and poignant memoir, Primary Lessons (CavanKerry Press, 2013), White recalls a childhood marked by equal measures of poverty and pride--formative years spent sorting through the "lessons" learned from a complicated relationship with her beloved, careworn mother and from a father's absence engendered by racial injustice and compromised manhood. Although born in Sumter, South Carolina, Sarah spends much of her first five years in Philadelphia in the care of her bighearted Aunt Susie and her husband, Uncle Whitey. As her parents fourth daughter, she has been sent north to ease her family's financial burden, freeing her mother to work as a schoolteacher. Young Sarah loves her life in Philadelphia, and is devastated when her mother comes to retrieve her and take her back to a home she has never known. There, she is shocked and confused to encounter strange signs that read "colored only" and to be told for the first time that black people must behave a certain way around white people and accept their lot as second class citizens. "The point of any successful memoir is to discover what the speaker learns on their journey," writes Kevin Pilkington, author of Ready to Eat the Sky and The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree, in his foreword to Primary Lessons. "[I]t is a trip worth taking when it teaches and enlightens and encourages me to revisit and solidify profound truths I already know to be true. Sarah Bracey Whites journey is a continuous struggle to find her way, a struggle I found both difficult and inspirational. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that 'injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' Young Sarah becomes aware of this at an early age, realizing being born poor and black is not the measure of a persons value."

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Sarah Bracey White

Apr 29, 2017

A Memoir

CavanKerry Press 2013

As an African-American child growing up in the segregated pre-Civil Rights South, Sarah Bracey White pushed against the social conventions that warned her not to rock the boat, even before she was old enough to fully understand her urge to defy the status quo. In her candid and poignant memoir, Primary Lessons (CavanKerry Press, 2013), White recalls a childhood marked by equal measures of poverty and pride--formative years spent sorting through the "lessons" learned from a complicated relationship with her beloved, careworn mother and from a father's absence engendered by racial injustice and compromised manhood. Although born in Sumter, South Carolina, Sarah spends much of her first five years in Philadelphia in the care of her bighearted Aunt Susie and her husband, Uncle Whitey. As her parents fourth daughter, she has been sent north to ease her family's financial burden, freeing her mother to work as a schoolteacher. Young Sarah loves her life in Philadelphia, and is devastated when her mother comes to retrieve her and take her back to a home she has never known. There, she is shocked and confused to encounter strange signs that read "colored only" and to be told for the first time that black people must behave a certain way around white people and accept their lot as second class citizens. "The point of any successful memoir is to discover what the speaker learns on their journey," writes Kevin Pilkington, author of Ready to Eat the Sky and The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree, in his foreword to Primary Lessons. "[I]t is a trip worth taking when it teaches and enlightens and encourages me to revisit and solidify profound truths I already know to be true. Sarah Bracey Whites journey is a continuous struggle to find her way, a struggle I found both difficult and inspirational. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that 'injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' Young Sarah becomes aware of this at an early age, realizing being born poor and black is not the measure of a persons value."

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Sarah Bracey White, "Primary Lessons: A Memoir" (CavanKerry Press,...

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Sarah Bracey White Apr 29, 2017 As an African-American child growing up in the segregated pre-Civil Rights South, Sarah Bracey White pushed against the social conventions that warned her not to rock the boat, even before she was old enough to fully understand her urge to defy the status quo.

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States of Childhood From the Junior Republic to the American Republic, 1895-1945

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States of Childhood From the Junior Republic to the American Republic, 1895-1945

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A number of curious communities sprang up across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: simulated cities, states, and nations in which children played the roles of legislators, police officers, bankers, journalists, shopkeepers, and other adults. They performed real work—passing laws, growing food, and constructing buildings, among other tasks—inside virtual worlds. In States of Childhood: From the Junior Republic to the American Republic, 1895-1945 (MIT Press, 2020), Jennifer Light examines the phenomena of “junior republics” and argues that they marked the transition to a new kind of “sheltered” childhood for American youth. Banished from the labor force and public life, children inhabited worlds that mirrored the one they had left. Light describes the invention of junior republics as independent institutions and how they were later established at schools, on playgrounds, in housing projects, and on city streets, as public officials discovered children's role playing helped their bottom line. The junior republic movement aligned with cutting-edge developmental psychology and educational philosophy, and complemented the era's fascination with models and miniatures, shaping educational and recreational programs across the nation. Light's account of how earlier generations distinguished "real life" from role playing reveals a hidden history of child labor in America and offers insights into the deep roots of such contemporary concepts as gamification, play labor, and virtuality. Jennifer S. Light is the Department Head of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and a Professor of the History of Science and of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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A number of curious communities sprang up across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: simulated cities, states, and nations in which children played the roles of legislators, police officers, bankers, journalists, shopkeepers, and other adults. They performed real work-passing laws, growing food, and constructing buildings, among other tasks-inside virtual worlds. InStates of Childhood: From the Junior Republic to the American Republic, 1895-1945 (MIT Press, 2020), Jennifer Light examines the phenomena of "junior republics" and argues that they marked the transition to a new kind of "sheltered" childhood for American youth. Banished from the labor force and public life, children inhabited worlds that mirrored the one they had left. Light describes the invention of junior republics as independent institutions and how they were later established at schools, on playgrounds, in housing projects, and on city streets, as public officials discovered children's role playing helped their bottom line. The junior republic movement aligned with cutting-edge developmental psychology and educational philosophy, and complemented the era's fascination with models and miniatures, shaping educational and recreational programs across the nation. Light's account of how earlier generations distinguished "real life" from role playing reveals a hidden history of child labor in America and offers insights into the deep roots of such contemporary concepts as gamification, play labor, and virtuality. Jennifer S. Light is the Department Head of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and a Professor of the History of Science and of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century.

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Jennifer S. Light, "States of Childhood: From the Junior Republic to...

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A number of curious communities sprang up across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: simulated cities, states, and nations in which children played the roles of legislators, police officers, bankers, journalists, shopkeepers, and other adults. They performed real work-passing laws, growing food, and constructing buildings, among other tasks-inside virtual worlds.

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Incorrigibles and Innocents Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics

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Incorrigibles and Innocents Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics

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Histories and criticism of comics note that comic strips published in the Progressive Era were dynamic spaces in which anxieties about race, ethnicity, class, and gender were expressed, perpetuated, and alleviated. The proliferation of comic strip children—white and nonwhite, middle-class and lower class, male and female—suggests that childhood was a subject that fascinated and preoccupied Americans at the turn of the century. Many of these strips, including R.F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley and Buster Brown, Rudolph Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids, and Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland were headlined by child characters. Yet no major study has explored the significance of these verbal-visual representations of childhood. Nominated for the Eisner Award and winner of the Charles Hatfield Book Prize as well as the Ray & Pat Browne Award, Lara Saguisag's new book, Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics (Rutgers University Press, 2018), addresses this gap in scholarship, examining the ways childhood was depicted and theorized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century comic strips. Drawing from and building on histories and theories of childhood, comics, and Progressive Era conceptualizations of citizenship and nationhood, Saguisag, Associate Professor of English at the College of Staten Island—City University of New York, demonstrates that child characters in comic strips expressed and complicated contemporary notions of who had a right to claim membership in a modernizing, expanding nation.

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Daniella Doron

Mar 21, 2016

Rebuilding Family and Nation

Indiana University Press 2015

InJewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Indiana UP, 2015), Daniella Doron, Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University, looks at the post-WWII effort to rehabilitate Jewish children and to reconstruct Jewish families in France. She argues that ideas about the family were tied to national identity, citizenship, and ethnicity. Her works adds to the growing scholarship on the history of childhood and the history of the Jewish family.

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Daniella Doron, "Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France:...

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Daniella Doron Mar 21, 2016 InJewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Indiana UP, 2015), Daniella Doron, Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University, looks at the post-WWII effort to rehabilitate Jewish children and to reconstruct Jewish families in France.

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Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar FranceRebuilding Family and Nation

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Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar FranceRebuilding Family and Nation

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In Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Indiana UP, 2015), Daniella Doron, Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University, looks at the post-WWII effort to rehabilitate Jewish children and to reconstruct Jewish families in France. She argues that ideas about the family were tied to national identity, citizenship, and ethnicity. Her works adds to the growing scholarship on the history of childhood and the history of the Jewish family.

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Daniella Doron

Mar 21, 2016

Rebuilding Family and Nation

Indiana University Press 2015

InJewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Indiana UP, 2015), Daniella Doron, Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University, looks at the post-WWII effort to rehabilitate Jewish children and to reconstruct Jewish families in France. She argues that ideas about the family were tied to national identity, citizenship, and ethnicity. Her works adds to the growing scholarship on the history of childhood and the history of the Jewish family.

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Daniella Doron, "Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France:...

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Daniella Doron Mar 21, 2016 InJewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Indiana UP, 2015), Daniella Doron, Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University, looks at the post-WWII effort to rehabilitate Jewish children and to reconstruct Jewish families in France.

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The End of American ChildhoodA History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child

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The End of American ChildhoodA History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child

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Paula S. Fass is a professor of history emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child (Princeton University Press, 2016) traces the changing views of childhood and childrearing as it followed the fortunes of the nation. Beginning with the nation's founding when independence was fostered in children, to the nineteenth-century sentimental view of childhood as a time of innocence, to today's parental anxiety about their children's success, Fass examines both the changing opinions of childrearing experts and the class differentiated practices of rural and urban Americans. As childhood extended into late adolescences the transition to adulthood was harder to define. Fass challenges parents to identify with what they share with previous generations and reconnect with the values that set American childhood apart from the rest of the world: the fostering of independence, self-definition, and competence.

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Paula S. Fass

Aug 11, 2016

A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child

Princeton University Press 2016

Paula S. Fass is a professor of history emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child (Princeton University Press, 2016) traces the changing views of childhood and childrearing as it followed the fortunes of the nation. Beginning with the nation's founding when independence was fostered in children, to the nineteenth-century sentimental view of childhood as a time of innocence, to today's parental anxiety about their children's success, Fass examines both the changing opinions of childrearing experts and the class differentiated practices of rural and urban Americans. As childhood extended into late adolescences the transition to adulthood was harder to define. Fass challenges parents to identify with what they share with previous generations and reconnect with the values that set American childhood apart from the rest of the world: the fostering of independence, self-definition, and competence. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation.

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Lilian Calles Barger

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the intellectual history of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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Paula S. Fass, "The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting...

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Paula S. Fass Aug 11, 2016 Paula S. Fass is a professor of history emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child (Princeton University Press, 2016) traces the changing views of childhood and childrearing as it followed the fortunes of the nation.

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In his book  Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Gray proposes the following big idea: we shouldn’t force children to learn, rather we should allow them to play and learn by themselves. This, of course, is a radical proposal. But Peter points out that the play-and-learn-along-the-way style of education was practiced by humans for over 99% our history: hunter-gatherers did not have schools, but children in them somehow managed to learn everything they needed to be good members of their bands. Peter says we should take a page out of their book and points to a school that has done just that: T he Sudbury Valley School.

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Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life

Basic Books 2013

In his bookFree to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Gray proposes the following big idea: we shouldn't force children to learn, rather we should allow them to play and learn by themselves. This, of course, is a radical proposal. But Peter points out that the play-and-learn-along-the-way style of education was practiced by humans for over 99% our history: hunter-gatherers did not have schools, but children in them somehow managed to learn everything they needed to be good members of their bands. Peter says we should take a page out of their book and points to a school that has done just that: T he Sudbury Valley School. (BTW: Peter has some very thoughtful things to say about the way standard schools actually promote bullying and are powerless to prevent it or remedy it once it's happened. Listen in.)

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Marshall Poe

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network.

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Peter Gray, "Free to Learn" (Basic Books, 2013)

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In his bookFree to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Gray proposes the following big idea: we shouldn't force children to learn, rather we should allow them to play and learn by themselves.

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Carroll Pursell‘s From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of Technology and Play (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) explores how play reflects and drives the evolution of American culture. Pursell engagingly examines the ways in which technology affects play and play shapes people. The objects that children (and adults) play with and play on, along with their games and the hobbies they pursue, can reinforce but also challenge gender roles and cultural norms. Inventors who often talk about “playing” at their work, as if motivated by the pure fun of invention have used new materials and technologies to reshape sports and gameplay, sometimes even crafting new, extreme forms of recreation, but always responding to popular demand. Drawing from a range of sources, including scholarly monographs, patent records, newspapers, and popular and technical journals, the book covers numerous modes and sites of play.

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Carroll Pursell's From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of Technology and Play (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) explores how play reflects and drives the evolution of American culture. Pursell engagingly examines the ways in which technology affects play and play shapes people. The objects that children (and adults) play with and play on, along with their games and the hobbies they pursue, can reinforce but also challenge gender roles and cultural norms. Inventors who often talk about "playing" at their work, as if motivated by the pure fun of invention have used new materials and technologies to reshape sports and gameplay, sometimes even crafting new, extreme forms of recreation, but always responding to popular demand. Drawing from a range of sources, including scholarly monographs, patent records, newspapers, and popular and technical journals, the book covers numerous modes and sites of play. Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She's also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida's Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18

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Carroll Pursell, "From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of...

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Carroll Pursell's From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of Technology and Play (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) explores how play reflects and drives the evolution of American culture. Pursell engagingly examines the ways in which technology affects play and play shapes people.

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In his new book, Tween Pop: Children’s Music and Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2020), Tyler Bickford explores how the tween music market rose during the mid to late 2000s. Bickford addresses the ways in which the music industry seized only childishness as a key element in legitimizing children's participation in public culture. Starting with how Kidz Bop and Disney’s High School Musical (2006), Bickford argues that tween music culture flourished due to the commodification of childhood and the rise of television and pop music stars. Focusing on the ways that femininity and whiteness are markers are innocence and childhood, Bickford examines Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana through a postfeminist discourse of work life balance, Taylor Swift’s longstanding relationship with girlhood and whiteness, and Justin Bieber’s label as child prodigy as a way to cement his position as a super star. In outlining how tween pop imagined and positioned childhood as both intimate and public as well as a cultural identity to be marketed to, Bickford demonstrates the importance of children's music to core questions of identity politics, consumer culture, and the public sphere.

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In his new book, Tween Pop: Children's Music and Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2020), Tyler Bickford explores how the tween music market rose during the mid to late 2000s. Bickford addresses the ways in which the music industry seized only childishness as a key element in legitimizing children's participation in public culture. Starting with how Kidz Bop and Disney's High School Musical (2006), Bickford argues that tween music culture flourished due to the commodification of childhood and the rise of television and pop music stars. Focusing on the ways that femininity and whiteness are markers are innocence and childhood, Bickford examines Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana through a postfeminist discourse of work life balance, Taylor Swift's longstanding relationship with girlhood and whiteness, and Justin Bieber's label as child prodigy as a way to cement his position as a super star. In outlining how tween pop imagined and positioned childhood as both intimate and public as well as a cultural identity to be marketed to, Bickford demonstrates the importance of children's music to core questions of identity politics, consumer culture, and the public sphere.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Tyler Bickford, "Tween Pop: Children's Music and Public Culture" (Duke UP, 2020)

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In his new book, Tween Pop: Children's Music and Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2020), Tyler Bickford explores how the tween music market rose during the mid to late 2000s. Bickford addresses the ways in which the music industry seized only childishness as a key element in legitimizing children's participation in public culture.

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In his new book, Tween Pop: Children's Music and Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2020), Tyler Bickford explores how the tween music market rose during the mid to late 2000s. Bickford addresses the ways in which the music industry seized only childishness as a key element in legitimizing children's participation in public culture. Starting with how Kidz Bop and Disney's High School Musical (2006), Bickford argues that tween music culture flourished due to the commodification of childhood and the rise of television and pop music stars. Focusing on the ways that femininity and whiteness are markers are innocence and childhood, Bickford examines Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana through a postfeminist discourse of work life balance, Taylor Swift's longstanding relationship with girlhood and whiteness, and Justin Bieber's label as child prodigy as a way to cement his position as a super star. In outlining how tween pop imagined and positioned childhood as both intimate and public as well as a cultural identity to be marketed to, Bickford demonstrates the importance of children's music to core questions of identity politics, consumer culture, and the public sphere.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Tyler Bickford, "Tween Pop: Children's Music and Public Culture" (Duke UP, 2020)

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In his new book, Tween Pop: Children's Music and Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2020), Tyler Bickford explores how the tween music market rose during the mid to late 2000s. Bickford addresses the ways in which the music industry seized only childishness as a key element in legitimizing children's participation in public culture.

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The early years are the ones that structure the life of a person. “The Beginning of Life - The Series” follows the successful movement of the movie, shedding light into Early Childhood Development in 6 episodes with never-seen footage from all over the globe, portraying new discoveries and moving stories. The fourth episode “Denied Childhood” shows that even though parents want the best for their children, not all of them are able to secure a safe and healthy environment. The episode highlights that to take care of babies and children, we first have to help the adult responsible for them.

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The Beginning of Life: The Series | Netflix

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Using breakthroughs in technology and neuroscience, this series examines how environment affects infants -- and how infants can affect our future.

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 "The Raising of America - Early Childhood and the Future of Our Nation"

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 "The Raising of America - Early Childhood and the Future of Our Nation"

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The series' Signature Hour interweaves discoveries from neuroscience with the stories of families and communities struggling to provide the nurturing environments all babies and young children need to thrive--while too often hindered by social conditions that put their children on low developmental paths. It reveals how stressors on parents - for time, money, and resources - can drip down on their infants and young children, literally altering the wiring of their developing brains with enduring effects. Why are so many children faring so poorly in the richest nation on the planet? How might we do better?

"Provides gripping evidence of the importance of early life experiences for children - and that programs and public policies can create much healthier children for the future." James M. Perrin, MD, FAAP Past President, American Academy of Pediatrics, Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School

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THE RAISING OF AMERICA: EARLY CHILDHOOD AND THE FUTURE OF OUR NATION is a five-part documentary series that explores how a strong start for all our kids can lead to a healthier, stronger and more equitable America.

The science...

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THE RAISING OF AMERICA: EARLY CHILDHOOD AND THE FUTURE OF OUR NATION is a five-part documentary series that explores how a strong start for all our kids can lead to a healthier, stronger and more equitable America. The science...

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(Available through Kent State libraries streaming, log in with VPN)

“The child may not remember, but the body remembers.” The original research was controversial, but the findings revealed the most important public health findings of a generation. RESILIENCE is a one-hour documentary that delves into the science of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and the birth of a new movement to treat and prevent Toxic Stress. Now understood to be one of the leading causes of every- thing from heart disease and cancer to substance abuse and depression, extremely stressful experiences in childhood can alter brain development and have lifelong effects on health and behavior. However, as experts and practitioners profiled in RESILIENCE are proving, what’s predictable is preventable. These physicians, educators, social workers and communities are daring to talk about the effects of divorce, abuse and neglect. And they’re using cutting edge science to help the next generation break the cycles of adversity and disease.

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THE BIOLOGY OF STRESS & THE SCIENCE OF HOPE "...AN ENGROSSING STUDY OF HOW ADVERSE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES (OR ACES) CAN BE LINKED TO DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR AND MEDICAL DISEASES" -Matt Fagerholm ROGEREBERT.COM THE BIOLOGY OF STRESS & THE SCIENCE OF HOPE

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The Tropes vs Women in Video Games project aims to examine the plot devices and patterns most often associated with female characters in gaming from a systemic, big picture perspective. This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters, but remember that it is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of it's more problematic or pernicious aspects.

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Tropes vs Women in Video Games - Season 1

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The Tropes vs Women in Video Games project aims to examine the plot devices and patterns most often associated with female characters in gaming from a system...

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A documentary on peer-to-peer bullying in schools across America.

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BULLY is an unflinching look at how bullying has touched five kids and their families, revealing a problem that transcends geographic, racial, and ethnic borders.

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In this episode we consider vital role of play, and what it does to expand a child’s creativity and resilience. Urban sociologist Tamara Mose is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College, and author of The Playdate: Parents, Children and the New Expectations of Play (NYU Press, 2016). She tells us about the strengths and perils of playdates, and the need for children to have unstructured play.

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In this episode we consider vital role of play, and what it does to expand a child's creativity and resilience.

Urban sociologist Tamara Mose is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College, and author of The Playdate: Parents, Children and the New Expectations of Play (NYU Press, 2016). She tells us about the strengths and perils of playdates, and the need for children to have unstructured play.

Educational consultant and teacher, Lucy Crehan, is the author of Cleverlands: The Secrets Behind the Success of the World's Education Superpowers (Random House, 2017), an exploration of the lessons learned from the world's top-performing education systems. Her research also highlights the importance of play in the learning process.

In Finland, where math and reading scores are among the highest in the world, "they don't start education formally until seven-years-old," says Lucy. Instead of meeting academic targets in kindergarten or first grade, "they're focusing on a much broader educational and social development before they start formal learning.

Solutions discussed include: The need for diversity during playdates and in children's lives, and the developmental role played by unsupervised play. The importance of high academic expectations for older children, and the creative role of play during the school year.
Richard Davies and are the host of the terrific podcast "How Do We Fix It?," on which they talk to the world's most creative thinkers about, well, how to fix things. Lots of things. Important ones. Highly recommended. You can find "How Do We Fix It" on Apple Podcasts.

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T. Mose "The Playdate" (NYU Press, 2016) and L. Crehan "Cleverlands" (Random House, 2017)

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In this episode we consider vital role of play, and what it does to expand a child's creativity and resilience. Urban sociologist Tamara Mose is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College, and author of The Playdate: Parents, Children and the New Expectations of Play (NYU Press, 2016).

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Frontline investigates the first generation to grow up with access to the Internet. It examines the risks and realities of teens and their online existence

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-- >> Frontline is made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

With major funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Helping to build a more just world.

And additional funding from the Park Foundation.

Committed to raising public awareness.

>> They are the first generation to come of age on the Internet .

>> You need to have the Internet on to talk to your friends, because everybody uses it.

>> It's just addicting.

I can go on for hours.

>> They've created their own virtual society.

>> When I'm online posting things, I'm completely, 100% me.

>> I had a whole different persona online.

I was only 14.

I looked like I was 18.

>> It's a world largely hidden from parents and teachers.

>> You can be more crazy online because there's no one watching to see what you're actually doing.

>> In general, it's pretty bad.

>> Like, if I were a parent and I saw half the things, I would cry, I think.

>> My son had these online relationships that were completely invisible to me.

>> Is a predator looking for your child?

>> But while we struggle to keep up, have we allowed our fears for their safety to run wild?

>> They don't realize that, when they're sharing on that keyboard, it's like, "Let 'em on in, baby."

>> It's not going to go away.

It's not a passing fad.

And nobody is really in charge.

>> Tonight, Frontline takes a peek inside the very public private lives of kids "Growing Up Online."

( heavy rock music playing ) >> Who's mouse is that?

>> You'll laugh when you get dominated in the face by it.

>> Why did you turn the firewall on?

>> Are we turning it on?

( groans ) >> Oh, yeah.

>> NARRATOR: It's Friday night, and six friends are having a party.

>> I might as well just like... ( gunfire and explosions ) >> NARRATOR: They've set up camp in a basement rec room, with desktop computers, high-definition monitors, and an excess of caffeine.

>> Oh, good ride.

>> NARRATOR: Within minutes, they're locked in battle.

>> Enemy down!

>> There you go.

There you go.

Die-- oh, man.

>> NARRATOR: Across town at a local community center, another party is getting started.

( hip hop music playing ) On one screen, the latest top-rated YouTube video... >> Dang, you are in our business.

Move.

>> NARRATOR: On another, a new heartthrob.

( girls laughing ) >> NARRATOR: Nearby, in his bedroom, a 13-year-old boy is updating his profile on MySpace.

>> My name is Clay Calamity.

So, I just picked "Calamity" because I thought it sounded cool.

These are links to comment me, message me or add me as a friend.

>> NARRATOR: Downstairs, his seven-year-old brother is getting a primer in socializing on the web on Club Penguin.

>> He invited me.

He said, "If you want to be in friends."

I'm his friend now.

>> NARRATOR: This is Morris County, New Jersey, but it could be anywhere in America.

Here, like in the rest of the country, some 90% of teenagers are online, a number that's still growing.

>> My mom is not home.

It's 3:00 in the morning, and I can be as loud as I want.

So that's what we're going to do.

>> NARRATOR: For teenagers, the Internet is an outlet for self expression... >> Hey, guys, what's up?

It's me, Josh.

>> NARRATOR: ...a place to complain about adults.. >> ...my parents, A.K.A., the parental units.

Yeah.

>> NARRATOR: ...and a means to connect with each other.

>> Uh, my name is Lorenzo, and I want to be your friend.

>> NARRATOR: This is the first generation to come of age immersed in a virtual world, outside the reach of their parents.

>> It's really hard to control what our kids are doing online.

What we have here is kind of the new Wild West.

Nobody's really in charge.

>> Cue Pimp, one.

>> It's just this huge shift, in which the Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it's something that really is the province of teenagers.

So, there's a proliferation of pictures and videos and them living their lives, in essence, online.

>> This is a generation that sees online not as a separate place you go, but as just a sort of continuation of their existence.

It's socialization, it's learning about life.

>> If I were to disconnect now, I'd probably sit in this chair for the rest of the night.

I wouldn't know what to do with myself.

You need to have the Internet on to talk to your friends because everybody uses it.

It's like a currency.

If you don't use it, you're going to be at the loss.

>> It's a pain?

>> It's a pain.

>> NARRATOR: Greg lives with his parents in Chatham, New Jersey.

>> He relies on it so heavily.

I don't even think he knows that he relies on it.

It's just part of his persona.

>> I can be in the same house at my desk downstairs and Greg is doing homework upstairs.

And I have a better chance of getting his attention by emailing him, because at least I know he'll see it.

You go upstairs and they're in tune to their machine or they're talking to 25 people at once, so it's an intrusion if I go in there.

>> You know, you go away on a vacation and they're texting all their friends.

There's, like, no break.

They're unwilling to be out of the loop for more than, you know, an hour.

>> Okay Mom, when I send you a text, go to "messages," "inbox," "okay."

>> Which thing do I press to get the message?

>> Mom, see if you can figure it out.

You went to college.

My parents, it seems like they don't know how to work a printer.

They don't know how to work the Internet.

They'll come up to me, they'll be like, "I don't know how to get to my email."

And I'm like, "Well, Mom, that's not the email, that's Microsoft Word."

>> NARRATOR: Greg's father tried using AOL parental controls to monitor Greg's Internet use.

>> I could see when he was trying to track me, so I would just bring up, like, Britannica.com, something he'd want me to be watching, I don't know.

And I would just slide it into the little viewer that he would be seeing.

And I would go on my way and do whatever I wanted, and he'd think I'd be researching monkeys or something.

>> NARRATOR: Greg's high school, too, is struggling to keep up with a student body more at home with technology than most of its faculty.

>> American debt versus... >> We have to be interactive because they're accustomed to sitting in front of a screen, and they've got five windows up and they're talking to three people at the same time.

We've got almost every instructional space in our building now with an LCD projector.

We've got smart boards in the classrooms.

We've got podcasting.

Teachers are broadcasting sections of their classes so that kids can revisit those at a later time.

We can't possibly expect the learner of today to be engrossed by someone who speaks in a monotone voice with a piece of chalk in their hand.

And our teachers are not doing that.

>> We almost have to be entertainers.

If you look at the advertising world and the media world that they live in, they consume so much media.

We have to cut through that cloud of information around them, cut through that media and capture their attention.

>> Is this an easy one?

Where are we?

There we are.

19 responses.

The answer is Middle Ages.

Why?

Just having a data projector in the ceiling means that you can show them almost anything that you want.

All these images.

See?

These take place at different times.

To walk into a classroom that doesn't have any of that media must be like walking into a desert.

>> One more, I want to take you one step further.

Technology on the whole has made me feel like a bit of a dinosaur.

My colleagues tease me.

There are times when my students know how to do things that I can't do technologically in the classroom, and I just let them take over, and they're naturals.

James?

>> NARRATOR: Rose Porpora has been teaching English at Chatham for three decades.

>> There are more students who struggle with the ability to focus than there were 30 years ago.

They are so overexposed to the quickness of things and the immediate responses.

It's just all at their fingertips.

So, when you have to reverse that and have them be quiet and give answers and carve out meaning, I think it's difficult for a lot of students.

>> I never read books.

I'll be honest.

I can't remember the last time I read a book.

Nowadays, people are so busy that they need to get summaries of it, like Sparknotes.

You can go on, it's a legitimate source, it pays enough attention to detail that you can get the assignment right, and you can read the whole book in a matter of pages.

So, I read all online.

I've actually never read, like, "Romeo and Juliet" so I read it yesterday in five minutes.

I feel like I've kind of cheated it.

I kind of feel like I owe it to myself to read some of these books, but I just know I don't have time.

I mean, if there were 27 hours in a day, I'd read "Hamlet."

I really would.

But it's only 24.

>> There's a rule here at the high school that they're not supposed to use Sparknotes or any other kind of study guide for an assigned reading.

>> I guarantee if you asked ten kids if they read books, eight of them will say they Sparknote it.

And the other two probably don't even read, I don't even know.

Everyone Sparknotes.

>> NARRATOR: Some of Chatham's teachers have tried to control cheating by having students complete their writing assignments in the classroom, where they can't go online and borrow from other sources.

For certain assignments, students have to submit their papers to an online service called TurnItIn.com, which searches the web for familiar words and phrases, alerting teachers to any instances of plagiarism.

But not all of Chatham's faculty think the old rules can apply anymore.

>> So, the answer is Renaissance?

>> Renaissance, yes.

You take it as a given that they're going to take stuff from Sparknotes and from other sources like that.

The question is how we react to that.

And we can react and say, "Okay, this is something that we have to fight against."

The other way to react to it is accept it as a reality, and say that that's how the outside world works.

If I can find someone who is working in advertising and who knows how to push a product and they can collect information from other sources and borrow and steal and put it together and reshape it, isn't that a skill that I want them to have?

>> INTERVIEWER: Are you saying cheating is okay?

>> I'm not saying that cheating is okay.

I'm saying that cheating is something you have to look at closer to say, "What is cheating and what's not cheating?"

>> Why does she create such polar opposites?

Salty?

I feel as though I'm fighting the good fight.

I'm trying to hang on to what I think is the most important part of what I do.

Who's next?

But my time is over.

This is too much for me.

It's not the educational arena that I entered into.

Okay, tomorrow is linking verb quiz.

Okay?

( school bell rings ) >> NARRATOR: When school lets out, kids flock to their phones or laptops to log onto social networking sites, electronic hangouts which have largely replaced real ones.

The two most popular, MySpace and Facebook, have over 160 million members combined.

>> I know, exactly.

>> Pretty much everyone has one.

It's like a section of the Internet that is your own, like, you can make it your personality exactly.

>> Like, everyone has a MySpace.

You can find the geeks, the nerds, the popular people.

Just all sorts of people.

>> NARRATOR: At the heart of the social networking site is the profile page, the hub of teens' online social lives.

Here, they describe themselves, post photos, receive comments from people, list their favorite bands and, most of all, accumulate friends.

>> If I get on it, I won't get off till my mom tells me to get off.

( laughs ) I was just staying on MySpace.

Like, you just message your friends and leave comments and picture comments, take pictures, like, pretty pictures, and you put it on MySpace and people comment it.

MySpace is addicting.

>> Addicting, yeah, it is.

( laughter ) >> It will tell you who's in a relationship, who's not in a relationship, when someone breaks up or when someone gets together.

>> NARRATOR: On MySpace and Facebook, kids vie for who can collect the most online friends.

>> There was a competition to who could have friends... most friends.

>> Yeah, that was the big thing at first.

That was huge.

>> "I have 2,000, blah, blah, blah," and, like, most of them you don't even know.

If you have 2,000... >> Because you have to admit, you really only know about 200 people, like, you actually met them in person, you know stuff about them.

You're only best friends with, like, 50 people.

And having 2,000 friends, you're like, "Oh, she's a fake or he's a fake."

>> NARRATOR: Social networking sites are also increasingly the place where kids hash out their conflicts.

At Morristown High School in the fall of 2006, two groups of girls began trading insults on MySpace.

>> Oh, I like this song, "Yo."

>> We would leave comments on their pages and leave messages to them, just talking junk.

And we just picked a big fight for no reason over MySpace.

>> The whole, like, verbal fighting was all on MySpace, never in front of, like, you know... never in school, always on MySpace.

Like, they would never confront us about anything.

They kept on and kept on and kept on and they would not stop.

>> They had left a comment on one of my friends' page talking about me, so I got real mad.

So, I was just, like, "Okay, so you talking all this junk about me, and you can't say it to my face.

I'm right here."

And so she got up, and we started fighting.

>> These two girls just went at it.

You know, they were just, like, beating each other up.

>> Chairs... there were chairs being thrown.

>> Security guards.

And then kids were just busting out their phones and videotaping this thing.

You know, why not?

Get some cool memory of it.

And someone posted it on YouTube.

>> It was a pretty good video.

( girls screaming on video ) >> NARRATOR: After the fight, seven girls were suspended from school.

>> It kind of made us famous.

People would be like, "Yo, I just seen y'all on YouTube."

Everybody was just going crazy over the video.

>> Everything happened, like, so... not kind... not fast, but it happened in a blur.

Like, "Oh, I want to fight you so much and I hate you.

I want to beat you up."

And now, when you think about it-- "Damn.

My college is probably going to see it.

I probably can't get this or that, everything's out there."

And it sucks.

>> They're definitely more comfortable being very public than we were.

Discretion, privacy, almost seem like a thing of the past.

>> What time is the game?

>> I think what we take so seriously, they take much less seriously.

>> I have had, like, relationships with guys online.

But, like, in school or in public, we're not actually friends.

Like, we're friends, but it's not like, "Oh, yo, come over to my house tonight."

It's all online.

I might go to guidance.

>> NARRATOR: Before she started going online, Sara was more reserved.

>> Like, once, I was talking to my friend and he was, like, "Send me a picture."

I was, like, "I don't want to send a naked picture of myself because I'm not comfortable with, like, my naked body."

He's like, "Fine, send it with minimal clothing on and I'll send you one of me."

So, we were both like, okay, so I went in the bathroom and took the picture, then I uploaded it to my computer and I emailed it to him.

And then I deleted it off my computer.

And it was just, like, something to do.

It didn't really mean anything.

It was just, like, a picture.

♪ We take to the streets till the sun comes up ♪ >> I used to have four pages of myself on MySpace, but I lowered it down to one.

>> In the pictures, like, you kind of want to look hot, but you don't want to look too hot, so people think, "Eww, whore."

>> Look at that dimple.

>> In my pictures, I try to smile on this side because of my dimple.

>> That's me.

I'm a princess.

>> I, like, moving around, posing, doing this, doing that.

>> Model shots.

>> Yeah, model shots.

( music playing ) >> In a way, the social networking sites are this digital representation of what we think of as adolescence.

So, what teens are doing is going around and trying on these different identities-- "I'm a goth" or "I'm a punk rocker" or "I'm a surfer" or "I'm this or that."

And the Internet has allowed them to display that identity in a very dramatic and very succinct way.

( rock music playing ) >> I didn't want to be known as "Jess."

That was the last thing that I ever wanted, because all it did was remind me of the girl who had no friends.

And I wanted to be the total opposite.

>> NARRATOR: For Jessica Hunter, growing up in Madison, New Jersey, was a series of daily humiliations.

>> I never fit the mold.

I would try and try and try and it... it just wasn't me.

I was constantly being made fun of.

People would push me into my locker, they'd constantly be calling me a goth.

I felt so insecure.

I felt like an alien in this all-white-bread town.

>> NARRATOR: But online, Jessica Hunter was reborn as the goth model and artist Autumn Edows.

>> Email address, profiles, everything.

Everything was Autumn Edows.

>> NARRATOR: Her parents didn't know.

>> I knew that I could not tell them because they wouldn't understand.

You know, like, I would lie my ass off just to keep my identity sacred.

>> She just withdrew.

You never saw her.

She wouldn't eat with us, she wouldn't... she just disappeared into her room.

I would open her door, you know, try to get in.

"What are you looking at, you know?"

The screen would change.

You know, I was concerned.

What's going on?

Is she talking to bad people?

What's going on here?

>> You know, I was only 14, but I looked like I was 18.

You know, I'd be in, like, lingerie or something.

And more and more, people started noticing.

Like, "Oh, you're so beautiful.

I love this picture of you."

It, like, really got big.

I was on the computer all day-- all day, replying.

Like, I would hit the "refresh" button and there would be, like, ten more comments.

It was crazy.

It was so crazy, but I loved it.

I heard from actual friends of mine that live in, you know, South Jersey.

They were, like, "Somebody came up to me today, was talking about you.

And they were asking me, 'So, like, have you ever heard of this model, Autumn Edows?'"

They were, like, "Yeah, you mean Jess, right?"

And the person would be, like, "No, her name's Autumn."

I didn't feel like myself, but I liked the fact that I didn't feel like myself.

I felt like someone completely different.

I felt like I was famous.

>> I get a phone call and the principal says one of the parents had seen disturbing photographs and material-- mostly it was the photographs-- of Jessica.

And they were considered to be pornographic, as far as she was concerned.

I had no idea what she was doing, no idea what was going on on the Internet.

That was a big surprise.

>> The principal ended up going to my Web site, deemed it completely and utterly provocative, inappropriate.

You know, it supposedly offended people.

Everyone was calling me a whore, you know, when, really, the pictures were, in comparison to the things that I've seen on the Internet, they really were not terrible.

Compared to, you know, the girls just taking pictures of their butts, you know, just with, like, a thong.

And that's what other girls would do, like, all throughout my school.

>> NARRATOR: Jessica's parents felt they had to intervene.

>> I remember my mother came up to my room and my computer used to be right behind me, and she stood right behind me and watched me delete every single file.

>> It was a lesson she had to learn.

And the lesson being: you don't know who you can trust, and you've got to be very careful about where this information goes, and how people perceive these photos or this information, how they can take it and change the context of it and get you in trouble.

And it was a tough lesson for her.

>> NARRATOR: It was all gone as quickly as it had begun-- the fame, the adulation, the hundreds of friends.

>> I was just completely erased from that whole world, that whole realm of the Internet, you know.

And it seems really stupid that, like, I'm getting upset over it, probably, to a lot of, you know, people.

But if you have something that's that meaningful to you, to have it taken away is, like, your worst nightmare.

>> My fear isn't that I have bad kids.

My fear is that my good kids will make a bad decision, one bad judgment, and pay for it permanently.

If it's on the net, it's open to anyone.

There are no safeguards.

Someone can always find everything.

( laughs ) I'm not wrong, exactly.

>> NARRATOR: Evan Skinner is the stay-at-home mother of four teenagers in Chatham, New Jersey, and president of Chatham High School's parent/teacher organization.

>> There is no lack of parent involvement in this community.

It can't be done without parents support.

We've had tremendous amounts of...

It is what is socially expected here.

There is a culture of involvement, there is a culture of participation, and so people do.

Thank you so much for coming today.

>> NARRATOR: Chatham, New Jersey, is less than an hour from Manhattan by train, but has the look and feel of a small town.

Parents here have worked hard to create a haven for their children.

>> Our kids are very much the children of a small town in a protected environment Kids walk to school.

There are crossing guards.

It's incredibly friendly.

It's... you know, it's safe.

>> NARRATOR: But the Internet, and social networking in particular, has punctured that sense of safety.

>> The scariest, worst part for me is stalkers, is somebody becoming obsessed with one of my children.

I thought it was asparagus sauce.

>> Tastes like ginger and soy.

>> And garlic.

>> I have two very attractive daughters.

Some guy that, all of a sudden, decides that, really, my daughter was meant for him.

That kind of stuff scares me.

Kids think, "I'm in my home.

How could anything bad happen to me?"

They don't realize that, when they're sharing on that keyboard, it's like, "Let 'em on in, baby."

Because they're right here.

>> Parents need to understand there are predators on the Internet who are more vicious than those who used to lurk in parks or playgrounds.

>> Internet predator... >> NARRATOR: Media coverage of online predators has been building in the last year.

>> Is enough being done to stop them before they strike?

>> It's an all new investigation... >> Oh, boy.

Oh, boy.

>> ...tonight on "To Catch A Predator."

>> NARRATOR: Congress has held hearings to address the question of predators' access to sites like MySpace and Facebook.

>> The bogeyman is real, and he lives on the net.

He lived in my computer, and he lives in yours.

He's at home with your children.

>> My mom calls it being an informed parent.

She, like, watches Dr. Phil.

She reads about all, like, the crime that happens, like the date rape or something like that, that occurs from the Internet, like, meeting people on the Internet .

So she's always been very cautious like that, but it's becoming sort of overbearing.

She just has a really tough time getting past that.

>> Did you find your class schedule, honey?

>> Ah, no, I was going to check that.

>> Is that what you're doing now?

>> No, I'm talking to Jeff.

>> Oh.

>> NARRATOR: As a way to keep tabs on her kids' Internet activity, Evan has stationed the one family computer in the kitchen, where she can keep an eye on it.

>> I don't know.

>> NARRATOR: But she says she still gets shut out.

>> If the kids are on Facebook and I'm making dinner or something, they're edgy.

I mean, there are times when I will close the refrigerator door and move in this direction-- boom, screen goes black.

>> Well, good evening, everyone.

I'm Agent Bill Tsigaras, computer crime unit.

First of all, parents need to take control of that computer.

You need to have passwords.

Take control of it.

>> NARRATOR: Evan would like to get the passwords to her kids' Facebook accounts.

>> I have an idea of how I can do that with my kids, where I will have them give me their passwords, but seal that envelope in some very safe way so they know that I haven't opened that password lightly.

But that if they should get into any trouble, if they should disappear, if they should be abducted, that I would be able to break that seal and then get into that information.

>> They asked me for the password and I said, "No, sorry, you're not getting it.

It's my Facebook, it's my business."

>> I'm ignoring them.

Okay, don't worry.

>> I believe that if my mom feels so strongly about how we appear on the Internet, that she would somehow try to get the passwords, that she would try to open the envelope or anything, because she does feel so strongly.

>> ( music playing ): Why me cranking... >> NARRATOR: Cam's sister, Tory, is just as reluctant to share her online life with her parents.

>> I'd rather not use our computer and just use it when I'm at my friends' house than have my mom go into my personal things and my private life and, like, take charge of it.

It's my own stuff.

Get out of the picture.

>> My parents, like, they don't understand that I've spent since second grade online, and that I know what to avoid, and I know pretty much what can happen.

And I think sometimes they forget that because they didn't grow up online.

>> If someone with a random screen name IMs you and says, like, "Hey, where do you live?

I want to meet you," it's pretty obvious, like, this person might be a predator.

>> Hit that block button.

>> If someone asks me like, "Where do you live?"

I'll delete them as a friend.

Like, why do you want to know where I live at?

I don't tell people where I live at.

>> NARRATOR: There has only been one major study of the threat of sexual predators online.

Funded by the Department of Justice, the study confirmed what many kids have been saying all along, that most of them know to ignore unwanted solicitations they receive on the Internet .

>> You know, most kids, they're not looking for trouble.

The vast majority are just socializing with their friends at school.

And when these weird guys send them a message, they just delete them.

>> NARRATOR: The study reported that one in seven kids said they had been sexually solicited online.

But researchers found most of those solicitations were mild.

>> Most of the sexual encounters, most of the sexual solicitations, they're not that big a deal when you actually look at them.

Most of it is the 19 year-old saying to the 17 year-old, "Hey, baby."

Is that really the image that we come to when we think about sexual solicitations?

No.

And we have found kids who have engaged in risky behavior online.

Fact is, they've engaged in a lot more risky behavior offline.

>> Sexual predators are a risk.

But all the cases, known cases of sexual exploitation involving social networks have involved kids who have gone out looking for a meeting with somebody.

They were not deceived.

We need to start thinking about our kids less as victims and more as participants.

>> All right, I'm texting Mike now.

>> Real problems, real damage can result because of things kids do to themselves and each other.

And that's what we need to be thinking about.

>> I'm 16.

I just turned 16 yesterday.

I'm a swimmer.

I have been swimming for seven years.

I play golf.

I'm really fun and outgoing.

And I work hard in school.

A lot of people in my school are like, "Wow, she's smart."

I know what it means, like everybody else does.

It's weird because I have this one life that's fake, that's, like, all happy-go-lucky, whatever.

And then I have the real me.

When I'm online, I'm the real person.

I'm completely, 100% me.

I'll talk about anything to these people because I know they won't judge me.

Sometimes it makes me feel better, because it's like, "Oh, there's people out here like me," like I can have a little niche of my own, a little comfort zone.

But sometimes, it makes me feel worse because I know how many people are suffering like me.

>> NARRATOR: Sara has an eating disorder.

>> I'll go on web sites, I'll go on forums, I'll look for something called "Thinspiration," which is basically inspiration to stay and become thinner than I am now.

It's just, like, here's other people who can do it, "Look at this woman, she did it.

I can do it, too."

She has a personal trainer, but she is probably anorexic or has an eating disorder.

>> What the Internet has done is provided these forums for anorexics who want to be anorexic to meet one another.

They almost deify anorexia.

They call anorexia "Ana," and then elevate Ana to the goddess Ana.

They... they say they're praying to the goddess Ana, or they're asking Ana for help.

These are women who take pride in their ability to deny themselves food and to keep their weight at this artificially low and dangerous level.

>> I can find ways and tips and tricks to, like, binge or to purge or just starve.

Stuff like that that just makes living with an eating disorder a little bit easier.

Like, what foods to binge on that are, like, healthy, and things to do, like, after you purge so that your throat doesn't burn as much, and things like that.

I'll be talking online to these people and I will be, like, the anorexic person that I am.

And I'll just go on and I'll see like, "Oh, wow, this person hardly eats.

Like, mad props to them.

Congratulations.

I wish I was like that."

But then sometimes, certain days, this, like, other side of me will kick in and be, go, "This is disgusting.

These people shouldn't be living like this.

What's wrong with them?"

It's like part of me is completely Ana, and part of me is anti-Ana.

So, it's like a complete struggle every day.

>> INTERVIEWER: What do your parents know?

>> Nothing.

>> INTERVIEWER: Nothing?

>> Nothing.

All they know is I like to eat healthy and I like to exercise.

They know nothing.

>> It really helps for me to talk about my feelings to someone, and know that people are listening.

>> NARRATOR: Why tell their parents when they have the whole world to talk to?

>> You know, it's better than talking to the people in my life.

>> So, if I put it out her, at least I'm getting it out.

And you guys can make what you want.

>> The Internet is always a willing listener.

It's very seductive.

>> And I thought I'd put my two cents in.

>> You can do it in the middle of the night when you can't sleep, you can do it when you're tired without any makeup.

>> I'm really bored.

>> And you forget who can see the things you're writing.

You forget the impact it may have in your life and on others.

To you, it's you and the Internet and the people you want to read it, not necessarily everyone who does.

>> It's like second nature for me.

I just go on YouTube... >> When you combine those things with the immediacy and the power of the technology to allow them to act on impulse, that's when everybody gets into trouble.

( shouting ) >> NARRATOR: Last January, a group of friends from Chatham High School headed into Manhattan to attend a rock concert.

Evan Skinner's son, Cam, was among them.

>> However many can fit in Madison Square Garden, there was about that many underage high schoolers going into the city on trains.

I was on the train.

I was partaking in the fun on the train, as well as all my friends were.

And there was a ton of pictures taken.

( music playing ) >> NARRATOR: The next day, the kids posted the pictures and videos online.

It didn't take long for Evan to hear about it.

>> It was horrifying.

Open, public drinking, vomiting on the trains going in, on the trains going out.

I'm talking about hundreds of kids, three emergency rooms around Madison Square Garden who had to close because they had so many kids.

Madison Square Garden ran out of wheelchairs to take drunken and unconscious children out of that place.

>> Get up!

>> Well, I found out through one of the parents.

And because I was the PTO president, I elected to share that information.

>> I got a video!

>> Put it on YouTube!

>> I will.

>> My mom decided that it was her duty-- her civic duty-- to send out an email to all the parents in the high school describing the events of the concert and the events on the train.

So, when parents are reading this... they read, "Your son and daughter, if they went to the concert, they were drinking.

And there are graphic pictures of your sons and daughters on the Internet .

Signed, Evan Skinner."

>> Well, my God, you cannot believe the response.

I got emails from people I didn't know existed.

About half of them were, like, "Thank you, thank you, thank you.

As a result of that email, I sat down with my child.

I had no idea.

He took me on FaceBook and showed me pictures from the concert.

It was absolutely appalling.

Blah, blah, blah."

And about half were the full gamut of, "Who the hell do you think you are?

You stay out of our lives, thank you so much," to, "Are you na瘹e?"

And the kids were furious.

>> I flipped out when that happened.

First of all, I think I had a right to just because, it was, in my opinion, so out of line.

That's what Aaron told me.

Wait, you were there, right?

Just because of this email, a couple of my friends got in trouble, a lot of people in my school got in trouble.

It just really made me mad.

I'm just sort of starting to realize how difficult it's been.

So, my mom and I have had sort of a tough year as far as getting along.

>> He has pretty much cut off his family being involved in his life other than we have dinner.

And he doesn't share, he doesn't talk about what he does.

He actually said that we had ruined his high school years.

I... it's...

I'm choking up just thinking about it.

I have spent almost two decades raising children, saying to myself, "Don't take it personally, don't take it personally, don't take it personally."

I remember being 11.

I remember being 13.

I remember being 16.

And I remember having secrets.

But it's really hard when it's the other side.

>> I am the leader... >> NARRATOR: It's been said that the Internet has created the greatest generation gap since the advent of rock 'n' roll.

>> I wonder where they'll go next.

I wonder what hangout they'll find where we aren't going to be watching, because they'll find it.

And there are so many devices they can use to connect, there are so many hot spots and friends' houses and libraries and cafes, all these places where they can go online, where we can't control them.

>> I clearly made a mistake putting that computer in his room.

I allowed the computer to become too much of his life.

My son had these online relationships going on that were completely invisible to me.

>> NARRATOR: When Ryan Halligan was in seventh grade, he told his father he was being bullied, and asked him to teach him how to fight.

>> Right after Christmas, we got into a routine.

We would go down into the basement after dinner and we'd put on the red boxing gloves.

And we had this conversation one night.

I said, "Now, Ryan, you know how to fight.

The last thing I want to see happen now is that you now start picking fights at school.

I don't ever want to learn that you're now the bully."

But I did say to him, I said, "Ryan, if that kid or any of his friends ever lay a single finger on you, you've got my full permission to wail on them."

>> NARRATOR: After that, things got better.

Ryan told his parents the bullying had stopped.

But then, in October of 2003, he killed himself.

>> You know, all I kept saying, asking myself was "Why?

Why?"

You know, I kept crying, "Why, Ryan?

Why did you do this?"

>> Anybody who would look at him as a child and then have a crystal ball and see into the future as to how he would die, you just wouldn't believe it.

>> Yay!

>> NARRATOR: Just days after Ryan's suicide, John turned on his son's computer, looking for answers.

>> I started to say, "Okay, there has to be something here."

At the time, I was concerned about what everybody was concerned about, predators and pedophiles.

Right?

I mean, that was what the media was talking about.

You heard the horror stories.

I thought, "Let me go log onto his AOL account.

Let me see if Ryan's friends will open up to me online."

>> I saw Ryan's screen name pop up.

And I was really angry, actually.

I thought someone was just playing a big joke.

And to me, that was not funny at all.

>> All these instant messages started popping up.

You know, "Who are you?

What are you doing?

This isn't funny.

Get off of Ryan's account."

And I was typing back as fast as I could.

"I'm Mr. Halligan.

Is there anything anybody is willing to share with me that might explain why Ryan did what he did?"

>> We just started talking about what I knew.

People would say things to Ryan over the Internet and at school, like, "You are such a loser," and just really mean things.

>> NARRATOR: Over the summer, Ryan had become the victim of a vicious cyber-bullying campaign.

One boy had started a rumor that Ryan was gay.

>> I didn't stick up for him at the time because I thought it was just that middle school bullying.

It happens.

But it was real, and it really hurt him.

>> You know, back in my day, if you were getting bullied, it ends at the schoolyard.

You come home and you have your safe haven.

But not for Ryan.

He came home and did what every other kid did-- he went online, and now the taunts got to continue at home as well.

>> NARRATOR: According to Ryan's friends, the tipping point came when a popular girl at school flirted with Ryan over instant messaging, only to humiliate him later by telling him it had all been a big joke.

It was a game she often played with boys online.

>> I guess the fun is, like, dropping the bomb-- you know, "Oh, just kidding"-- and then that, like, crushed him.

I mean, you wouldn't do that to someone's face.

But online, it's completely different.

You can do whatever you want and no one can do anything.

You're at your house, they're at their house.

It's different.

>> There's something about reading words.

You read it over and over again, and you start to believe it.

The words make it real.

One of the kids told me, "You never know if it's your best friend or your worst enemy that's doing this."

Because so much of it comes to you anonymously.

So you never know who to trust.

>> NARRATOR: As the days turned into weeks, John probed deeper into his son's online life.

He discovered a folder on Ryan's computer containing a series of conversations between Ryan and a boy with a screen name he didn't recognize.

>> The two of them were spending a lot of time exchanging information that they were finding online that had to do with suicide and death.

They found one web site that taught you how to hang yourself, so it gave you how to tie the noose.

>> There was a web site that Ryan and this boy visited, and they commiserated on that you plug in your personality traits and what you like and dislike, and then they spit out the best way you can commit suicide.

>> The most chilling conversation was actually a very short one.

Ryan started off saying, "Tonight's the night I think I'm going to do it," And the kid fired back, "It's about 'blanking' time."

>> NARRATOR: Two weeks later, in the early morning of October 7, 2003, Ryan's sister found him hanging from a noose in his bathroom.

In the weeks that followed, John felt compelled to track down the boy he thought might have been Ryan's co-conspirator.

>> I approached him online with Ryan's I.D.

and I said, "I'm Ryan's dad."

And I asked him, "Were you friends with Ryan?"

And he said, "Yes."

And I said, "Did you guys ever talk about death or suicide?"

And he said, "No."

I just flat out asked him, "So, what is your name?"

And he gave me his real name.

And while I still had him online, I called the house and got the father on the phone.

And I introduced myself to him and I said, "I'm afraid that your son is perhaps thinking of doing what my son had done."

The response was kind of weird.

It was... you know, he first said, "Well, I know nothing about computers.

I don't have an email account, so you can't email this to me."

And I said, "Well, I'd like to get it to you somehow."

And he said, "Well, I'll have my wife call you when she comes home from work."

That evening went by, I never got a call.

Another day went by, no call.

>> NARRATOR: Four years have gone by now, and John says he never got a satisfying response from the boy or his family.

Occasionally, he still visits the boy's web site, which is full of references to death and suicide.

>> I had so much unresolved pain, and I instinctively wanted somebody to pay for this.

I wanted to blame somebody so desperately.

Um, blame.

I feel the computer...

I can't blame the computer.

The computer and the Internet were not the cause of my son's suicide, but they helped...

I believe they helped amplify and accelerate the hurt and the pain that he was trying to deal with that started in person, in the real world.

>> NARRATOR: Across the country, cases of cyber-bullying have been springing up more and more.

A few have ended in suicide; most haven't.

But it's clear that the Internet has become a new weapon in the arsenal of adolescence, one that's not going away.

>> Let's get going.

If somebody's been cyber-bullied, what advice do we give them?

We teach our kids to be kind to other people.

"Please," "Thank you," opening doors, giving up their seat for somebody who's older.

So, in the same way, we need to teach them good cyber-citizenship.

>> You stop what you're doing, you don't answer back, block the person and tell an adult.

>> We need to teach them good manners online.

>> Stop, block and tell!

>> We need to teach them how to use the technology responsibly.

Okay, and what should we tell them?

And if we can do that, we can keep the kids safe.

>> Tell them you've been receiving some mean messages, and you want them to stop.

>> You have a generation who's faced with a society with fundamentally different properties, thanks to the Internet .

We can turn our backs and say, "This is bad" or "We don't want a world like this."

But it's not going away.

So, instead of saying that this is terrible, instead of saying, "Stop MySpace, stop FaceBook, you know, stop the Internet ," it's a question for us of how we teach ourselves and our children to live in a society where these properties are fundamentally a way of life.

This is public life today.

>> NARRATOR: Soon after Jessica Hunter's parents made her take down her website, she rebuilt it.

She is back online as Autumn Edows.

You know, I gotta be honest... >> NARRATOR: Jessica's father is surprised to find himself supporting her.

I think you're actually going to turn out okay.

( laughter ) It took a long time for me to finally say, "Well, you know, this may not be such a bad thing."

She found a world that she could live in.

And, yeah, you find on the Internet what you want.

If it's bad, if they're looking to hurt, that's what they're going to look for, and they're going to find it.

But if you're looking for a way to create or to reach out, that's what they're going to find on the Internet.

>> You know, maybe they don't always agree with it, but they do support me, most definitely.

And I think that, to a degree, they're proud of me.

You know I love you.

>> You know, people say things about the Internet and that they talk about the danger.

From where I stand, I'm glad it's there.

>> NARRATOR: After her interview with Frontline, Sara told her parents about her eating disorder.

She started seeing a therapist.

>> I want to get better, but you can't just go cold turkey on it.

So I hope that it's not my life for the rest of my life, because I know I should not be living like this and I can't live like this.

But I always look to the next day, but the next day isn't always as good as I hoped.

( band playing "Pomp and Circumstance" ) >> NARRATOR: Last June, the class of 2007 graduated from Chatham High School.

>> Graduates, we are all here to celebrate your accomplishments.

>> NARRATOR: Evan Skinner was there to watch her son, Cam, graduate.

>> Cam and I have gone through some rough times.

I think adolescence is just the most difficult time for kids to be kids and parents to be parents.

I would say that the loss of open sharing and communication is the single most painful part of being a parent for me.

>> NARRATOR: Greg Bukata graduated, too.

He had made a big decision.

>> It'll be hard, but I need to disconnect.

I need to just pull the plug on this Internet life for a little bit, and see what it's like.

Right now, face it, all I do is sit online when I'm sitting home.

>> Gregory William Buchanan.

>> NARRATOR: At the Coast Guard Academy, where Greg will be attending in the fall, he will be prohibited from using cell phones or the Internet for the first two months.

His parents aren't sure he's going to make it.

>> I think it's going to be a huge withdrawal for him.

>> I think he's going to have trouble.

>> Yeah.

>> I really do, because he's never been without it.

>> Cameron McCutchon Skinner.

>> NARRATOR: Cam Skinner will also be going on to college.

He says he's joined a new FaceBook group for his college class of 2011.

And he won't be giving his mother the password.

>> Class of 2007, congratulations.

( cheers and applause ) >> This report continues on our web site, or you can watch the full program again online.

Read extended interviews with teachers... >> What is cheating and what is not cheating?

>> ...parents... >> Boom, the screen goes black!

>> I was concerned.

What's going on?

>> ...and a researcher who's studying teenagers and the Internet.

>> The Internet has allowed them to display that identity.

>> ...get updates on the kids featured in the program.

>> No, I should not be living like this, and I can't live like this.

>> I would try and try and try.

And it just wasn't me.

>> ...some background from the producers on reporting this story, and then join the discussion at pbs.org.

>> Next time on Frontline, in a lawless territory... ( shot fired ) ... off limits to the U.S. military and the CIA... >> There's enemy infiltrating from Pakistan.

>> ...al Qaeda and the Taliban have regrouped... >> The situation in Afghanistan is more dire than we've seen publicly portrayed.

>> From inside this secretive land... > These guys have shown they are not going to quit.

>> Frontline investigates "The Return of the Taliban."

>> To order Frontline's "Growing up Online" on DVD, call PBS home video at 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org >> Frontline is made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

With major funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Helping to build a more just world.

And additional funding from the Park Foundation.

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FRONTLINE | Growing Up Online | Season 2008 | Episode 3 | PBS

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2009 Emmy Nominee: What does it mean to be coming of age in the Internet era?

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Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood

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Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood

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With virtually no government or public outcry, the multi-billion dollar youth marketing industry has been able to use the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world. American kids now influence an estimated $700 billion in annual spending, targeted virtually from birth with a relentless bombardment of sophisticated commercial appeals designed to sell everything from Hollywood merchandise and junk foods to iPods, cell phones, the family car and vacations. The result is that childhood itself has been commercialized.

Drawing on the insights of experts, industry insiders, and children themselves, CONSUMING KIDS traces the evolution and impact of this disturbing and unprecedented phenomenon, exposing the youth marketing industry's controversial tactics and exploring the effect of hyper-consumerism on the actual lived experience of children.

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With virtually no government or public outcry, the multi-billion dollar youth marketing industry has been able to use the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of...

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With virtually no government or public outcry, the multi-billion dollar youth marketing industry has been able to use the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of...

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T. Mose "The Playdate" (NYU Press, 2016) and L. Crehan "Cleverlands" (Random House, 2017) 

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T. Mose "The Playdate" (NYU Press, 2016) and L. Crehan "Cleverlands" (Random House, 2017) 

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New Books in Sociology Feb 5, 2020

In this episode we consider vital role of play, and what it does to expand a child’s creativity and resilience. Urban sociologist Tamara Mose is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College, and author of The Playdate: Parents, Children and the New Expectations of Play (NYU Press, 2016). She tells us about the strengths and perils of playdates, and the need for children to have unstructured play.

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In this episode we consider vital role of play, and what it does to expand a child's creativity and resilience.

Urban sociologist Tamara Mose is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College, and author of The Playdate: Parents, Children and the New Expectations of Play (NYU Press, 2016). She tells us about the strengths and perils of playdates, and the need for children to have unstructured play.

Educational consultant and teacher, Lucy Crehan, is the author of Cleverlands: The Secrets Behind the Success of the World's Education Superpowers (Random House, 2017), an exploration of the lessons learned from the world's top-performing education systems. Her research also highlights the importance of play in the learning process.

In Finland, where math and reading scores are among the highest in the world, "they don't start education formally until seven-years-old," says Lucy. Instead of meeting academic targets in kindergarten or first grade, "they're focusing on a much broader educational and social development before they start formal learning.

Solutions discussed include: The need for diversity during playdates and in children's lives, and the developmental role played by unsupervised play. The importance of high academic expectations for older children, and the creative role of play during the school year.
Richard Davies and are the host of the terrific podcast "How Do We Fix It?," on which they talk to the world's most creative thinkers about, well, how to fix things. Lots of things. Important ones. Highly recommended. You can find "How Do We Fix It" on Apple Podcasts.

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T. Mose "The Playdate" (NYU Press, 2016) and L. Crehan "Cleverlands" (Random House, 2017)

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In this episode we consider vital role of play, and what it does to expand a child's creativity and resilience. Urban sociologist Tamara Mose is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College, and author of The Playdate: Parents, Children and the New Expectations of Play (NYU Press, 2016).

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The Beginning of Life Series Episode 6: The Emergence of Self 

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The Beginning of Life Series Episode 6: The Emergence of Self 

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A baby’s development of self is an astounding process, on that involves profound bonding with individuals as well as nature and physics

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The Beginning of Life: The Series | Netflix

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Using breakthroughs in technology and neuroscience, this series examines how environment affects infants -- and how infants can affect our future.

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Why Black girls are targeted for punishment in schools

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Why Black girls are targeted for punishment in schools

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Around the world, black girls are being pushed out of schools because of policies that target them for punishment, says author and social justice scholar Monique W. Morris. The result: countless girls are forced into unsafe futures with restricted opportunities. How can we put an end to this crisis? In an impassioned talk, Morris uncovers the causes of "pushout" and shows how we can work to turn all schools into spaces where black girls can heal and thrive

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Monique W. Morris | The New Press, 2018 | Book

Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

I wrote this book to help the public better understand what facilitates school pushout for Black girls — the policies, practices, conditions and prevailing consciousness that criminalize and exclude children from learning environments. It relies heavily on the expert narratives of girls who have experienced suspensions, expulsions and incarceration: as the community most impacted by the problem, they are also the ones we should look to for solutions to the crisis.

Angela Y. Davis | Seven Stories Press, 2003 | Book

Are Prisons Obsolete?

One of the primary scholars on justice and the Black freedom movement, Dr. Davis raises critical questions in this book about school-to-confinement pathways and why we should work to "transform schools into vehicles for decarceration." It will challenge you. It will free you.

The National Women's Law Center | Explore

Let Her Learn Campaign

From reports generated by participatory research, to toolkits for parents and schools, this campaign is an important one to follow.

| Explore

The National Black Women's Justice Institute

NBWJI produces research reports and conducts training and technical assistance with practitioners to interrupt school-to-confinement pathways for girls and counter the criminalization of Black women, girls, and their families.

Prince | Lovesexy, 1988 | Listen

"Anna Stesia"

In my mind, everyone should listen to Prince ... but in particular, this song about the revolutionary and transformative power of love.

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Monique W. Morris: Why Black girls are targeted for punishment at school -- and how to change that

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Around the world, Black girls are being pushed out of schools because of policies that target them for punishment, says author and social justice scholar Monique W. Morris. The result: countless girls are forced into unsafe futures with restricted opportunities. How can we put an end to this crisis?

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Stephanie Coontz - Exploring the Meaning of Marriage

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Stephanie Coontz - Exploring the Meaning of Marriage

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In this episode Mark Groves is joined by Stephanie Coontz, researcher, academic and author of seven books on marriage and family. They explore topics ranging from traditions, gender roles, the evolution of relationships in history and the more recent impacts of technology on relationships.

Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA and is Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families. She has authored seven books on marriage and family life, including A Strange Stirring: ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. Coontz is a frequent guest columnist for the New York Times and CNN.com. Selected articles and tv appearances can be found at www.stephaniecoontz.com

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Mark Groves - Create The Love: Making Your Heart Make Sense

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Stephanie Coontz - Exploring the Meaning of Marriage

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this episode Mark Groves is joined by Stephanie Coontz, researcher, academic and author of seven books on marriage and family. They explore topics ranging from traditions, gender roles, the evolution of relationships in history and the more recent impacts of technology on relationships.

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The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.

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The family structure we've held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It's time to figure out better ways to live together.

The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history: Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables-siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old family stories for the 37th time. "It was the most beautiful place you've ever seen in your life," says one, remembering his first day in America. "There were lights everywhere ... It was a celebration of light! I thought they were for me."

To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app.

The oldsters start squabbling about whose memory is better. "It was cold that day," one says about some faraway memory. "What are you talking about? It was May, late May," says another. The young children sit wide-eyed, absorbing family lore and trying to piece together the plotline of the generations.

After the meal, there are piles of plates in the sink, squads of children conspiring mischievously in the basement. Groups of young parents huddle in a hallway, making plans. The old men nap on couches, waiting for dessert. It's the extended family in all its tangled, loving, exhausting glory.

This particular family is the one depicted in Barry Levinson's 1990 film, Avalon, based on his own childhood in Baltimore. Five brothers came to America from Eastern Europe around the time of World War I and built a wallpaper business. For a while they did everything together, like in the old country. But as the movie goes along, the extended family begins to split apart. Some members move to the suburbs for more privacy and space. One leaves for a job in a different state. The big blowup comes over something that seems trivial but isn't: The eldest of the brothers arrives late to a Thanksgiving dinner to find that the family has begun the meal without him.

"You cut the turkey without me?" he cries. "Your own flesh and blood! ... You cut the turkey?" The pace of life is speeding up. Convenience, privacy, and mobility are more important than family loyalty. "The idea that they would eat before the brother arrived was a sign of disrespect," Levinson told me recently when I asked him about that scene. "That was the real crack in the family. When you violate the protocol, the whole family structure begins to collapse."

As the years go by in the movie, the extended family plays a smaller and smaller role. By the 1960s, there's no extended family at Thanksgiving. It's just a young father and mother and their son and daughter, eating turkey off trays in front of the television. In the final scene, the main character is living alone in a nursing home, wondering what happened. "In the end, you spend everything you've ever saved, sell everything you've ever owned, just to exist in a place like this."

"In my childhood," Levinson told me, "you'd gather around the grandparents and they would tell the family stories ... Now individuals sit around the TV, watching other families' stories." The main theme of Avalon, he said, is "the decentralization of the family. And that has continued even further today. Once, families at least gathered around the television. Now each person has their own screen."

This is the story of our times-the story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms. The initial result of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn't seem so bad. But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We've made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We've made life better for adults but worse for children. We've moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.
Annie Lowrey: The great affordability crisis breaking America
This article is about that process, and the devastation it has wrought-and about how Americans are now groping to build new kinds of family and find better ways to live.

Part I

The Era of Extended Clans

Through the early parts of American history, most people lived in what, by today's standards, were big, sprawling households. In 1800, three-quarters of American workers were farmers. Most of the other quarter worked in small family businesses, like dry-goods stores. People needed a lot of labor to run these enterprises. It was not uncommon for married couples to have seven or eight children. In addition, there might be stray aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as unrelated servants, apprentices, and farmhands. (On some southern farms, of course, enslaved African Americans were also an integral part of production and work life.)

Steven Ruggles, a professor of history and population studies at the University of Minnesota, calls these "corporate families"-social units organized around a family business. According to Ruggles, in 1800, 90 percent of American families were corporate families. Until 1850, roughly three-quarters of Americans older than 65 lived with their kids and grandkids. Nuclear families existed, but they were surrounded by extended or corporate families.
Read: What number of kids makes parents happiest?
Extended families have two great strengths. The first is resilience. An extended family is one or more families in a supporting web. Your spouse and children come first, but there are also cousins, in-laws, grandparents-a complex web of relationships among, say, seven, 10, or 20 people. If a mother dies, siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents are there to step in. If a relationship between a father and a child ruptures, others can fill the breach. Extended families have more people to share the unexpected burdens-when a kid gets sick in the middle of the day or when an adult unexpectedly loses a job.

A detached nuclear family, by contrast, is an intense set of relationships among, say, four people. If one relationship breaks, there are no shock absorbers. In a nuclear family, the end of the marriage means the end of the family as it was previously understood.

The second great strength of extended families is their socializing force. Multiple adults teach children right from wrong, how to behave toward others, how to be kind. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, industrialization and cultural change began to threaten traditional ways of life. Many people in Britain and the United States doubled down on the extended family in order to create a moral haven in a heartless world. According to Ruggles, the prevalence of extended families living together roughly doubled from 1750 to 1900, and this way of life was more common than at any time before or since.

During the Victorian era, the idea of "hearth and home" became a cultural ideal. The home "is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods, before whose faces none may come but those whom they can receive with love," the great Victorian social critic John Ruskin wrote. This shift was led by the upper-middle class, which was coming to see the family less as an economic unit and more as an emotional and moral unit, a rectory for the formation of hearts and souls.

But while extended families have strengths, they can also be exhausting and stifling. They allow little privacy; you are forced to be in daily intimate contact with people you didn't choose. There's more stability but less mobility. Family bonds are thicker, but individual choice is diminished. You have less space to make your own way in life. In the Victorian era, families were patriarchal, favoring men in general and first-born sons in particular.

As factories opened in the big U.S. cities, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, young men and women left their extended families to chase the American dream. These young people married as soon as they could. A young man on a farm might wait until 26 to get married; in the lonely city, men married at 22 or 23. From 1890 to 1960, the average age of first marriage dropped by 3.6 years for men and 2.2 years for women.
From September 2019: Daniel Markovits on how life became an endless, terrible competition
The families they started were nuclear families. The decline of multigenerational cohabiting families exactly mirrors the decline in farm employment. Children were no longer raised to assume economic roles-they were raised so that at adolescence they could fly from the nest, become independent, and seek partners of their own. They were raised not for embeddedness but for autonomy. By the 1920s, the nuclear family with a male breadwinner had replaced the corporate family as the dominant family form. By 1960, 77.5 percent of all children were living with their two parents, who were married, and apart from their extended family.

The Short, Happy Life of the Nuclear Family

For a time, it all seemed to work. From 1950 to 1965, divorce rates dropped, fertility rates rose, and the American nuclear family seemed to be in wonderful shape. And most people seemed prosperous and happy. In these years, a kind of cult formed around this type of family-what McCall's, the leading women's magazine of the day, called "togetherness." Healthy people lived in two-parent families. In a 1957 survey, more than half of the respondents said that unmarried people were "sick," "immoral," or "neurotic."

During this period, a certain family ideal became engraved in our minds: a married couple with 2.5 kids. When we think of the American family, many of us still revert to this ideal. When we have debates about how to strengthen the family, we are thinking of the two-parent nuclear family, with one or two kids, probably living in some detached family home on some suburban street. We take it as the norm, even though this wasn't the way most humans lived during the tens of thousands of years before 1950, and it isn't the way most humans have lived during the 55 years since 1965.

Today, only a minority of American households are traditional two-parent nuclear families and only one-third of American individuals live in this kind of family. That 1950-65 window was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.

For one thing, most women were relegated to the home. Many corporations, well into the mid-20th century, barred married women from employment: Companies would hire single women, but if those women got married, they would have to quit. Demeaning and disempowering treatment of women was rampant. Women spent enormous numbers of hours trapped inside the home under the headship of their husband, raising children.

For another thing, nuclear families in this era were much more connected to other nuclear families than they are today-constituting a " modified extended family," as the sociologist Eugene Litwak calls it, "a coalition of nuclear families in a state of mutual dependence." Even as late as the 1950s, before television and air-conditioning had fully caught on, people continued to live on one another's front porches and were part of one another's lives. Friends felt free to discipline one another's children.

In his book The Lost City, the journalist Alan Ehrenhalt describes life in mid-century Chicago and its suburbs:

To be a young homeowner in a suburb like Elmhurst in the 1950s was to participate in a communal enterprise that only the most determined loner could escape: barbecues, coffee klatches, volleyball games, baby-sitting co-ops and constant bartering of household goods, child rearing by the nearest parents who happened to be around, neighbors wandering through the door at any hour without knocking-all these were devices by which young adults who had been set down in a wilderness of tract homes made a community. It was a life lived in public.

Finally, conditions in the wider society were ideal for family stability. The postwar period was a high-water mark of church attendance, unionization, social trust, and mass prosperity-all things that correlate with family cohesion. A man could relatively easily find a job that would allow him to be the breadwinner for a single-income family. By 1961, the median American man age 25 to 29 was earning nearly 400 percent more than his father had earned at about the same age.

In short, the period from 1950 to 1965 demonstrated that a stable society can be built around nuclear families-so long as women are relegated to the household, nuclear families are so intertwined that they are basically extended families by another name, and every economic and sociological condition in society is working together to support the institution.

Video: How the Nuclear Family Broke Down

Disintegration

But these conditions did not last. The constellation of forces that had briefly shored up the nuclear family began to fall away, and the sheltered family of the 1950s was supplanted by the stressed family of every decade since. Some of the strains were economic. Starting in the mid-'70s, young men's wages declined, putting pressure on working-class families in particular. The major strains were cultural. Society became more individualistic and more self-oriented. People put greater value on privacy and autonomy. A rising feminist movement helped endow women with greater freedom to live and work as they chose.
Read: Gen-X women are caught in a generational tug-of-war
A study of women's magazines by the sociologists Francesca Cancian and Steven L. Gordon found that from 1900 to 1979, themes of putting family before self dominated in the 1950s: "Love means self-sacrifice and compromise." In the 1960s and '70s, putting self before family was prominent: "Love means self-expression and individuality." Men absorbed these cultural themes, too. The master trend in Baby Boomer culture generally was liberation-"Free Bird," "Born to Run," "Ramblin' Man."

Eli Finkel, a psychologist and marriage scholar at Northwestern University, has argued that since the 1960s, the dominant family culture has been the "self-expressive marriage." "Americans," he has written, "now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth." Marriage, according to the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, "is no longer primarily about childbearing and childrearing. Now marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment."
Read: An interview with Eli Finkel on how we expect too much from our romantic partners
This cultural shift was very good for some adults, but it was not so good for families generally. Fewer relatives are around in times of stress to help a couple work through them. If you married for love, staying together made less sense when the love died. This attenuation of marital ties may have begun during the late 1800s: The number of divorces increased about fifteenfold from 1870 to 1920, and then climbed more or less continuously through the first several decades of the nuclear-family era. As the intellectual historian Christopher Lasch noted in the late 1970s, the American family didn't start coming apart in the 1960s; it had been "coming apart for more than 100 years."

Americans today have less family than ever before. From 1970 to 2012, the share of households consisting of married couples with kids has been cut in half. In 1960, according to census data, just 13 percent of all households were single-person households. In 2018, that figure was 28 percent. In 1850, 75 percent of Americans older than 65 lived with relatives; by 1990, only 18 percent did.

Over the past two generations, people have spent less and less time in marriage-they are marrying later, if at all, and divorcing more. In 1950, 27 percent of marriages ended in divorce; today, about 45 percent do. In 1960, 72 percent of American adults were married. In 2017, nearly half of American adults were single. According to a 2014 report from the Urban Institute, roughly 90 percent of Baby Boomer women and 80 percent of Gen X women married by age 40, while only about 70 percent of late-Millennial women were expected to do so-the lowest rate in U.S. history. And while more than four-fifths of American adults in a 2019 Pew Research Center survey said that getting married is not essential to living a fulfilling life, it's not just the institution of marriage they're eschewing: In 2004, 33 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 were living without a romantic partner, according to the General Social Survey; by 2018, that number was up to 51 percent.

Over the past two generations, families have also gotten a lot smaller. The general American birth rate is half of what it was in 1960. In 2012, most American family households had no children. There are more American homes with pets than with kids. In 1970, about 20 percent of households had five or more people. As of 2012, only 9.6 percent did.
We're likely living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. The causes are economic, cultural, and institutional all at once.
Over the past two generations, the physical space separating nuclear families has widened. Before, sisters-in-law shouted greetings across the street at each other from their porches. Kids would dash from home to home and eat out of whoever's fridge was closest by. But lawns have grown more expansive and porch life has declined, creating a buffer of space that separates the house and family from anyone else. As Mandy Len Catron recently noted in The Atlantic, married people are less likely to visit parents and siblings, and less inclined to help them do chores or offer emotional support. A code of family self-sufficiency prevails: Mom, Dad, and the kids are on their own, with a barrier around their island home.

Finally, over the past two generations, families have grown more unequal. America now has two entirely different family regimes. Among the highly educated, family patterns are almost as stable as they were in the 1950s; among the less fortunate, family life is often utter chaos. There's a reason for that divide: Affluent people have the resources to effectively buy extended family, in order to shore themselves up. Think of all the child-rearing labor affluent parents now buy that used to be done by extended kin: babysitting, professional child care, tutoring, coaching, therapy, expensive after-school programs. (For that matter, think of how the affluent can hire therapists and life coaches for themselves, as replacement for kin or close friends.) These expensive tools and services not only support children's development and help prepare them to compete in the meritocracy; by reducing stress and time commitments for parents, they preserve the amity of marriage. Affluent conservatives often pat themselves on the back for having stable nuclear families. They preach that everybody else should build stable families too. But then they ignore one of the main reasons their own families are stable: They can afford to purchase the support that extended family used to provide-and that the people they preach at, further down the income scale, cannot.
Read: 'Intensive' parenting is a strategy for an age of inequality
In 1970, the family structures of the rich and poor did not differ that greatly. Now there is a chasm between them. As of 2005, 85 percent of children born to upper-middle-class families were living with both biological parents when the mom was 40. Among working-class families, only 30 percent were. According to a 2012 report from the National Center for Health Statistics, college-educated women ages 22 to 44 have a 78 percent chance of having their first marriage last at least 20 years. Women in the same age range with a high-school degree or less have only about a 40 percent chance. Among Americans ages 18 to 55, only 26 percent of the poor and 39 percent of the working class are currently married. In her book Generation Unbound, Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, cited research indicating that differences in family structure have "increased income inequality by 25 percent." If the U.S. returned to the marriage rates of 1970, child poverty would be 20 percent lower. As Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, once put it, "It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged."

When you put everything together, we're likely living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. The causes are economic, cultural, and institutional all at once. People who grow up in a nuclear family tend to have a more individualistic mind-set than people who grow up in a multigenerational extended clan. People with an individualistic mind-set tend to be less willing to sacrifice self for the sake of the family, and the result is more family disruption. People who grow up in disrupted families have more trouble getting the education they need to have prosperous careers. People who don't have prosperous careers have trouble building stable families, because of financial challenges and other stressors. The children in those families become more isolated and more traumatized.
Read: The working-to-afford-child-care conundrum
Many people growing up in this era have no secure base from which to launch themselves and no well-defined pathway to adulthood. For those who have the human capital to explore, fall down, and have their fall cushioned, that means great freedom and opportunity-and for those who lack those resources, it tends to mean great confusion, drift, and pain.

Over the past 50 years, federal and state governments have tried to mitigate the deleterious effects of these trends. They've tried to increase marriage rates, push down divorce rates, boost fertility, and all the rest. The focus has always been on strengthening the nuclear family, not the extended family. Occasionally, a discrete program will yield some positive results, but the widening of family inequality continues unabated.

The people who suffer the most from the decline in family support are the vulnerable-especially children. In 1960, roughly 5 percent of children were born to unmarried women. Now about 40 percent are. The Pew Research Center reported that 11 percent of children lived apart from their father in 1960. In 2010, 27 percent did. Now about half of American children will spend their childhood with both biological parents. Twenty percent of young adults have no contact at all with their father (though in some cases that's because the father is deceased). American children are more likely to live in a single-parent household than children from any other country.
Read: The divorce gap
We all know stable and loving single-parent families. But on average, children of single parents or unmarried cohabiting parents tend to have worse health outcomes, worse mental-health outcomes, less academic success, more behavioral problems, and higher truancy rates than do children living with their two married biological parents. According to work by Richard V. Reeves, a co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, if you are born into poverty and raised by your married parents, you have an 80 percent chance of climbing out of it. If you are born into poverty and raised by an unmarried mother, you have a 50 percent chance of remaining stuck.

It's not just the lack of relationships that hurts children; it's the churn. According to a 2003 study that Andrew Cherlin cites, 12 percent of American kids had lived in at least three "parental partnerships" before they turned 15. The transition moments, when mom's old partner moves out or her new partner moves in, are the hardest on kids, Cherlin shows.

While children are the vulnerable group most obviously affected by recent changes in family structure, they are not the only one.

Consider single men. Extended families provided men with the fortifying influences of male bonding and female companionship. Today many American males spend the first 20 years of their life without a father and the next 15 without a spouse. Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute has spent a good chunk of her career examining the wreckage caused by the decline of the American family, and cites evidence showing that, in the absence of the connection and meaning that family provides, unmarried men are less healthy-alcohol and drug abuse are common-earn less, and die sooner than married men.
The period when the nuclear family flourished was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired to obscure its essential fragility.
For women, the nuclear-family structure imposes different pressures. Though women have benefited greatly from the loosening of traditional family structures-they have more freedom to choose the lives they want-many mothers who decide to raise their young children without extended family nearby find that they have chosen a lifestyle that is brutally hard and isolating. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that women still spend significantly more time on housework and child care than men do, according to recent data. Thus, the reality we see around us: stressed, tired mothers trying to balance work and parenting, and having to reschedule work when family life gets messy.

Without extended families, older Americans have also suffered. According to the AARP, 35 percent of Americans over 45 say they are chronically lonely. Many older people are now "elder orphans," with no close relatives or friends to take care of them. In 2015, The New York Times ran an article called " The Lonely Death of George Bell," about a family-less 72-year-old man who died alone and rotted in his Queens apartment for so long that by the time police found him, his body was unrecognizable.
Read: The loneliness of early parenthood
Finally, because groups that have endured greater levels of discrimination tend to have more fragile families, African Americans have suffered disproportionately in the era of the detached nuclear family. Nearly half of black families are led by an unmarried single woman, compared with less than one-sixth of white families. (The high rate of black incarceration guarantees a shortage of available men to be husbands or caretakers of children.) According to census data from 2010, 25 percent of black women over 35 have never been married, compared with 8 percent of white women. Two-thirds of African American children lived in single-parent families in 2018, compared with a quarter of white children. Black single-parent families are most concentrated in precisely those parts of the country in which slavery was most prevalent. Research by John Iceland, a professor of sociology and demography at Penn State, suggests that the differences between white and black family structure explain 30 percent of the affluence gap between the two groups.

In 2004, the journalist and urbanist Jane Jacobs published her final book, an assessment of North American society called Dark Age Ahead. At the core of her argument was the idea that families are "rigged to fail." The structures that once supported the family no longer exist, she wrote. Jacobs was too pessimistic about many things, but for millions of people, the shift from big and/or extended families to detached nuclear families has indeed been a disaster.

As the social structures that support the family have decayed, the debate about it has taken on a mythical quality. Social conservatives insist that we can bring the nuclear family back. But the conditions that made for stable nuclear families in the 1950s are never returning. Conservatives have nothing to say to the kid whose dad has split, whose mom has had three other kids with different dads; "go live in a nuclear family" is really not relevant advice. If only a minority of households are traditional nuclear families, that means the majority are something else: single parents, never-married parents, blended families, grandparent-headed families, serial partnerships, and so on. Conservative ideas have not caught up with this reality.

Progressives, meanwhile, still talk like self-expressive individualists of the 1970s: People should have the freedom to pick whatever family form works for them. And, of course, they should. But many of the new family forms do not work well for most people-and while progressive elites say that all family structures are fine, their own behavior suggests that they believe otherwise. As the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has pointed out, highly educated progressives may talk a tolerant game on family structure when speaking about society at large, but they have extremely strict expectations for their own families. When Wilcox asked his University of Virginia students if they thought having a child out of wedlock was wrong, 62 percent said it was not wrong. When he asked the students how their own parents would feel if they themselves had a child out of wedlock, 97 percent said their parents would "freak out." In a recent survey by the Institute for Family Studies, college-educated Californians ages 18 to 50 were less likely than those who hadn't graduated from college to say that having a baby out of wedlock is wrong. But they were more likely to say that personally they did not approve of having a baby out of wedlock.
Read: How politics in Trump's America divides families
In other words, while social conservatives have a philosophy of family life they can't operationalize, because it no longer is relevant, progressives have no philosophy of family life at all, because they don't want to seem judgmental. The sexual revolution has come and gone, and it's left us with no governing norms of family life, no guiding values, no articulated ideals. On this most central issue, our shared culture often has nothing relevant to say-and so for decades things have been falling apart.

The good news is that human beings adapt, even if politics are slow to do so. When one family form stops working, people cast about for something new-sometimes finding it in something very old.
Read: Why is it hard for liberals to talk about 'family values'?
Part II

Redefining Kinship

In the beginning was the band. For tens of thousands of years, people commonly lived in small bands of, say, 25 people, which linked up with perhaps 20 other bands to form a tribe. People in the band went out foraging for food and brought it back to share. They hunted together, fought wars together, made clothing for one another, looked after one another's kids. In every realm of life, they relied on their extended family and wider kin.

Except they didn't define kin the way we do today. We think of kin as those biologically related to us. But throughout most of human history, kinship was something you could create.

Anthropologists have been arguing for decades about what exactly kinship is. Studying traditional societies, they have found wide varieties of created kinship among different cultures. For the Ilongot people of the Philippines, people who migrated somewhere together are kin. For the New Guineans of the Nebilyer Valley, kinship is created by sharing grease -the life force found in mother's milk or sweet potatoes. The Chuukese people in Micronesia have a saying: "My sibling from the same canoe"; if two people survive a dangerous trial at sea, then they become kin. On the Alaskan North Slope, the Inupiat name their children after dead people, and those children are considered members of their namesake's family.

In other words, for vast stretches of human history people lived in extended families consisting of not just people they were related to but people they chose to cooperate with. An international research team recently did a genetic analysis of people who were buried together-and therefore presumably lived together-34,000 years ago in what is now Russia. They found that the people who were buried together were not closely related to one another. In a study of 32 present-day foraging societies, primary kin-parents, siblings, and children-usually made up less than 10 percent of a residential band. Extended families in traditional societies may or may not have been genetically close, but they were probably emotionally closer than most of us can imagine. In a beautiful essay on kinship, Marshall Sahlins, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, says that kin in many such societies share a "mutuality of being." The late religion scholar J. Prytz-Johansen wrote that kinship is experienced as an "inner solidarity" of souls. The late South African anthropologist Monica Wilson described kinsmen as "mystically dependent" on one another. Kinsmen belong to one another, Sahlins writes, because they see themselves as "members of one another."

Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, when European Protestants came to North America, their relatively individualistic culture existed alongside Native Americans' very communal culture. In his book Tribe, Sebastian Junger describes what happened next: While European settlers kept defecting to go live with Native American families, almost no Native Americans ever defected to go live with European families. Europeans occasionally captured Native Americans and forced them to come live with them. They taught them English and educated them in Western ways. But almost every time they were able, the indigenous Americans fled. European settlers were sometimes captured by Native Americans during wars and brought to live in Native communities. They rarely tried to run away. This bothered the Europeans. They had the superior civilization, so why were people voting with their feet to go live in another way?

When you read such accounts, you can't help but wonder whether our civilization has somehow made a gigantic mistake.

We can't go back, of course. Western individualists are no longer the kind of people who live in prehistoric bands. We may even no longer be the kind of people who were featured in the early scenes of Avalon. We value privacy and individual freedom too much.

Our culture is oddly stuck. We want stability and rootedness, but also mobility, dynamic capitalism, and the liberty to adopt the lifestyle we choose. We want close families, but not the legal, cultural, and sociological constraints that made them possible. We've seen the wreckage left behind by the collapse of the detached nuclear family. We've seen the rise of opioid addiction, of suicide, of depression, of inequality-all products, in part, of a family structure that is too fragile, and a society that is too detached, disconnected, and distrustful. And yet we can't quite return to a more collective world. The words the historians Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg wrote in 1988 are even truer today: "Many Americans are groping for a new paradigm of American family life, but in the meantime a profound sense of confusion and ambivalence reigns."

From Nuclear Families to Forged Families

Yet recent signs suggest at least the possibility that a new family paradigm is emerging. Many of the statistics I've cited are dire. But they describe the past-what got us to where we are now. In reaction to family chaos, accumulating evidence suggests, the prioritization of family is beginning to make a comeback. Americans are experimenting with new forms of kinship and extended family in search of stability.

Usually behavior changes before we realize that a new cultural paradigm has emerged. Imagine hundreds of millions of tiny arrows. In times of social transformation, they shift direction-a few at first, and then a lot. Nobody notices for a while, but then eventually people begin to recognize that a new pattern, and a new set of values, has emerged.

That may be happening now-in part out of necessity but in part by choice. Since the 1970s, and especially since the 2008 recession, economic pressures have pushed Americans toward greater reliance on family. Starting around 2012, the share of children living with married parents began to inch up. And college students have more contact with their parents than they did a generation ago. We tend to deride this as helicopter parenting or a failure to launch, and it has its excesses. But the educational process is longer and more expensive these days, so it makes sense that young adults rely on their parents for longer than they used to.

In 1980, only 12 percent of Americans lived in multigenerational households. But the financial crisis of 2008 prompted a sharp rise in multigenerational homes. Today 20 percent of Americans- 64 million people, an all-time high -live in multigenerational homes.

The revival of the extended family has largely been driven by young adults moving back home. In 2014, 35 percent of American men ages 18 to 34 lived with their parents. In time this shift might show itself to be mostly healthy, impelled not just by economic necessity but by beneficent social impulses; polling data suggest that many young people are already looking ahead to helping their parents in old age.

Another chunk of the revival is attributable to seniors moving in with their children. The percentage of seniors who live alone peaked around 1990. Now more than a fifth of Americans 65 and over live in multigenerational homes. This doesn't count the large share of seniors who are moving to be close to their grandkids but not into the same household.

Immigrants and people of color-many of whom face greater economic and social stress-are more likely to live in extended-family households. More than 20 percent of Asians, black people, and Latinos live in multigenerational households, compared with 16 percent of white people. As America becomes more diverse, extended families are becoming more common.

African Americans have always relied on extended family more than white Americans do. "Despite the forces working to separate us-slavery, Jim Crow, forced migration, the prison system, gentrification-we have maintained an incredible commitment to each other," Mia Birdsong, the author of the forthcoming book How We Show Up, told me recently. "The reality is, black families are expansive, fluid, and brilliantly rely on the support, knowledge, and capacity of 'the village' to take care of each other. Here's an illustration: The white researcher/social worker/whatever sees a child moving between their mother's house, their grandparents' house, and their uncle's house and sees that as 'instability.' But what's actually happening is the family (extended and chosen) is leveraging all of its resources to raise that child."

The black extended family survived even under slavery, and all the forced family separations that involved. Family was essential in the Jim Crow South and in the inner cities of the North, as a way to cope with the stresses of mass migration and limited opportunities, and with structural racism. But government policy sometimes made it more difficult for this family form to thrive. I began my career as a police reporter in Chicago, writing about public-housing projects like Cabrini-Green. Guided by social-science research, politicians tore down neighborhoods of rickety low-rise buildings-uprooting the complex webs of social connection those buildings supported, despite high rates of violence and crime-and put up big apartment buildings. The result was a horror: violent crime, gangs taking over the elevators, the erosion of family and neighborly life. Fortunately, those buildings have since been torn down themselves, replaced by mixed-income communities that are more amenable to the profusion of family forms.
Read: Why black families struggle to build wealth I often ask African friends who have immigrated to America what most struck them when they arrived. Their answer is always a variation on a theme-the loneliness.
The return of multigenerational living arrangements is already changing the built landscape. A 2016 survey by a real-estate consulting firm found that 44 percent of home buyers were looking for a home that would accommodate their elderly parents, and 42 percent wanted one that would accommodate their returning adult children. Home builders have responded by putting up houses that are what the construction firm Lennar calls "two homes under one roof." These houses are carefully built so that family members can spend time together while also preserving their privacy. Many of these homes have a shared mudroom, laundry room, and common area. But the "in-law suite," the place for aging parents, has its own entrance, kitchenette, and dining area. The "Millennial suite," the place for boomeranging adult children, has its own driveway and entrance too. These developments, of course, cater to those who can afford houses in the first place-but they speak to a common realization: Family members of different generations need to do more to support one another.

The most interesting extended families are those that stretch across kinship lines. The past several years have seen the rise of new living arrangements that bring nonbiological kin into family or familylike relationships. On the website CoAbode, single mothers can find other single mothers interested in sharing a home. All across the country, you can find co-housing projects, in which groups of adults live as members of an extended family, with separate sleeping quarters and shared communal areas. Common, a real-estate-development company that launched in 2015, operates more than 25 co-housing communities, in six cities, where young singles can live this way. Common also recently teamed up with another developer, Tishman Speyer, to launch Kin, a co-housing community for young parents. Each young family has its own living quarters, but the facilities also have shared play spaces, child-care services, and family-oriented events and outings.

These experiments, and others like them, suggest that while people still want flexibility and some privacy, they are casting about for more communal ways of living, guided by a still-developing set of values. At a co-housing community in Oakland, California, called Temescal Commons, the 23 members, ranging in age from 1 to 83, live in a complex with nine housing units. This is not some rich Bay Area hipster commune. The apartments are small, and the residents are middle- and working-class. They have a shared courtyard and a shared industrial-size kitchen where residents prepare a communal dinner on Thursday and Sunday nights. Upkeep is a shared responsibility. The adults babysit one another's children, and members borrow sugar and milk from one another. The older parents counsel the younger ones. When members of this extended family have suffered bouts of unemployment or major health crises, the whole clan has rallied together.

Courtney E. Martin, a writer who focuses on how people are redefining the American dream, is a Temescal Commons resident. "I really love that our kids grow up with different versions of adulthood all around, especially different versions of masculinity," she told me. "We consider all of our kids all of our kids." Martin has a 3-year-old daughter, Stella, who has a special bond with a young man in his 20s that never would have taken root outside this extended-family structure. "Stella makes him laugh, and David feels awesome that this 3-year-old adores him," Martin said. This is the kind of magic, she concluded, that wealth can't buy. You can only have it through time and commitment, by joining an extended family. This kind of community would fall apart if residents moved in and out. But at least in this case, they don't.
Read: The hot new Millennial housing trend is a repeat of the Middle Ages
As Martin was talking, I was struck by one crucial difference between the old extended families like those in Avalon and the new ones of today: the role of women. The extended family in Avalon thrived because all the women in the family were locked in the kitchen, feeding 25 people at a time. In 2008, a team of American and Japanese researchers found that women in multigenerational households in Japan were at greater risk of heart disease than women living with spouses only, likely because of stress. But today's extended-family living arrangements have much more diverse gender roles.

And yet in at least one respect, the new families Americans are forming would look familiar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors from eons ago. That's because they are chosen families-they transcend traditional kinship lines.
Read: The extended family of my two open adoptions

The modern chosen-family movement came to prominence in San Francisco in the 1980s among gay men and lesbians, many of whom had become estranged from their biological families and had only one another for support in coping with the trauma of the AIDS crisis. In her book, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, the anthropologist Kath Weston writes, "The families I saw gay men and lesbians creating in the Bay Area tended to have extremely fluid boundaries, not unlike kinship organization among sectors of the African-American, American Indian, and white working class."

She continues:

Like their heterosexual counterparts, most gay men and lesbians insisted that family members are people who are "there for you," people you can count on emotionally and materially. "They take care of me," said one man, "I take care of them."

These groups are what Daniel Burns, a political scientist at the University of Dallas, calls "forged families." Tragedy and suffering have pushed people together in a way that goes deeper than just a convenient living arrangement. They become, as the anthropologists say, "fictive kin."

Over the past several decades, the decline of the nuclear family has created an epidemic of trauma-millions have been set adrift because what should have been the most loving and secure relationship in their life broke. Slowly, but with increasing frequency, these drifting individuals are coming together to create forged families. These forged families have a feeling of determined commitment. The members of your chosen family are the people who will show up for you no matter what. On Pinterest you can find placards to hang on the kitchen wall where forged families gather: "Family isn't always blood. It's the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile & who love you no matter what."

Two years ago, I started something called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. Weave exists to support and draw attention to people and organizations around the country who are building community. Over time, my colleagues and I have realized that one thing most of the Weavers have in common is this: They provide the kind of care to nonkin that many of us provide only to kin-the kind of support that used to be provided by the extended family.

Lisa Fitzpatrick, who was a health-care executive in New Orleans, is a Weaver. One day she was sitting in the passenger seat of a car when she noticed two young boys, 10 or 11, lifting something heavy. It was a gun. They used it to shoot her in the face. It was a gang-initiation ritual. When she recovered, she realized that she was just collateral damage. The real victims were the young boys who had to shoot somebody to get into a family, their gang.

She quit her job and began working with gang members. She opened her home to young kids who might otherwise join gangs. One Saturday afternoon, 35 kids were hanging around her house. She asked them why they were spending a lovely day at the home of a middle-aged woman. They replied, "You were the first person who ever opened the door."

In Salt Lake City, an organization called the Other Side Academy provides serious felons with an extended family. Many of the men and women who are admitted into the program have been allowed to leave prison, where they were generally serving long sentences, but must live in a group home and work at shared businesses, a moving company and a thrift store. The goal is to transform the character of each family member. During the day they work as movers or cashiers. Then they dine together and gather several evenings a week for something called "Games": They call one another out for any small moral failure-being sloppy with a move; not treating another family member with respect; being passive-aggressive, selfish, or avoidant.

Games is not polite. The residents scream at one another in order to break through the layers of armor that have built up in prison. Imagine two gigantic men covered in tattoos screaming "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" At the session I attended, I thought they would come to blows. But after the anger, there's a kind of closeness that didn't exist before. Men and women who have never had a loving family suddenly have "relatives" who hold them accountable and demand a standard of moral excellence. Extreme integrity becomes a way of belonging to the clan. The Other Side Academy provides unwanted people with an opportunity to give care, and creates out of that care a ferocious forged family.

I could tell you hundreds of stories like this, about organizations that bring traumatized vets into extended-family settings, or nursing homes that house preschools so that senior citizens and young children can go through life together. In Baltimore, a nonprofit called Thread surrounds underperforming students with volunteers, some of whom are called "grandparents." In Chicago, Becoming a Man helps disadvantaged youth form family-type bonds with one another. In Washington, D.C., I recently met a group of middle-aged female scientists-one a celebrated cellular biologist at the National Institutes of Health, another an astrophysicist-who live together in a Catholic lay community, pooling their resources and sharing their lives. The variety of forged families in America today is endless.
For many people, the era of the nuclear family has been a catastrophe. All forms of inequality are cruel, but family inequality may be the cruelest. It damages the heart.
You may be part of a forged family yourself. I am. In 2015, I was invited to the house of a couple named Kathy and David, who had created an extended-family-like group in D.C. called All Our Kids, or AOK-DC. Some years earlier, Kathy and David had had a kid in D.C. Public Schools who had a friend named James, who often had nothing to eat and no place to stay, so they suggested that he stay with them. That kid had a friend in similar circumstances, and those friends had friends. By the time I joined them, roughly 25 kids were having dinner every Thursday night, and several of them were sleeping in the basement.

I joined the community and never left-they became my chosen family. We have dinner together on Thursday nights, celebrate holidays together, and vacation together. The kids call Kathy and David Mom and Dad. In the early days, the adults in our clan served as parental figures for the young people-replacing their broken cellphones, supporting them when depression struck, raising money for their college tuition. When a young woman in our group needed a new kidney, David gave her one of his.

We had our primary biological families, which came first, but we also had this family. Now the young people in this forged family are in their 20s and need us less. David and Kathy have left Washington, but they stay in constant contact. The dinners still happen. We still see one another and look after one another. The years of eating together and going through life together have created a bond. If a crisis hit anyone, we'd all show up. The experience has convinced me that everybody should have membership in a forged family with people completely unlike themselves.

Ever since I started working on this article, a chart has been haunting me. It plots the percentage of people living alone in a country against that nation's GDP. There's a strong correlation. Nations where a fifth of the people live alone, like Denmark and Finland, are a lot richer than nations where almost no one lives alone, like the ones in Latin America or Africa. Rich nations have smaller households than poor nations. The average German lives in a household with 2.7 people. The average Gambian lives in a household with 13.8 people.

That chart suggests two things, especially in the American context. First, the market wants us to live alone or with just a few people. That way we are mobile, unattached, and uncommitted, able to devote an enormous number of hours to our jobs. Second, when people who are raised in developed countries get money, they buy privacy.

For the privileged, this sort of works. The arrangement enables the affluent to dedicate more hours to work and email, unencumbered by family commitments. They can afford to hire people who will do the work that extended family used to do. But a lingering sadness lurks, an awareness that life is emotionally vacant when family and close friends aren't physically present, when neighbors aren't geographically or metaphorically close enough for you to lean on them, or for them to lean on you. Today's crisis of connection flows from the impoverishment of family life.

I often ask African friends who have immigrated to America what most struck them when they arrived. Their answer is always a variation on a theme-the loneliness. It's the empty suburban street in the middle of the day, maybe with a lone mother pushing a baby carriage on the sidewalk but nobody else around.

For those who are not privileged, the era of the isolated nuclear family has been a catastrophe. It's led to broken families or no families; to merry-go-round families that leave children traumatized and isolated; to senior citizens dying alone in a room. All forms of inequality are cruel, but family inequality may be the cruelest. It damages the heart. Eventually family inequality even undermines the economy the nuclear family was meant to serve: Children who grow up in chaos have trouble becoming skilled, stable, and socially mobile employees later on.

When hyper-individualism kicked into gear in the 1960s, people experimented with new ways of living that embraced individualistic values. Today we are crawling out from the wreckage of that hyper-individualism-which left many families detached and unsupported-and people are experimenting with more connected ways of living, with new shapes and varieties of extended families. Government support can help nurture this experimentation, particularly for the working-class and the poor, with things like child tax credits, coaching programs to improve parenting skills in struggling families, subsidized early education, and expanded parental leave. While the most important shifts will be cultural, and driven by individual choices, family life is under so much social stress and economic pressure in the poorer reaches of American society that no recovery is likely without some government action.

The two-parent family, meanwhile, is not about to go extinct. For many people, especially those with financial and social resources, it is a great way to live and raise children. But a new and more communal ethos is emerging, one that is consistent with 21st-century reality and 21st-century values.

When we discuss the problems confronting the country, we don't talk about family enough. It feels too judgmental. Too uncomfortable. Maybe even too religious. But the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems-with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force-stem from that crumbling. We've left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it's not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time. This is a significant opportunity, a chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms. For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin.

It's time to find ways to bring back the big tables.
This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline "The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake." When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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The family structure we've held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It's time to figure out better ways to live together.

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Histories of Childhood and Youth in the Middle East (Podcast)

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Histories of Childhood and Youth in the Middle East (Podcast)

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Does everybody have a childhood? What kinds of childhood experiences have defined the modern Middle East? In this episode, three scholars discuss the methodological excitements and challenges of studying the history of childhood and youth in the modern Middle East. They discuss the roles of institutions like the army, the medical mission, and the school; the rise of state and colonial power; and the emergence of youth politics, all with an eye to history's younger actors and witnesses. Throughout, they consider how using age as a category of analysis might change the ways we understand the past and the ways we live in the present.

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Histories of Childhood and Youth in the Middle East

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Episode 402 with Dylan Baun, Heidi Morrison, and Murat Yildiz hosted by Suzie Ferguson Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | ...

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The Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Podcast)

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The Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Podcast)

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One of the most callous and tragic aspects of slavery in the United States was the slave owners’ practice of dividing families: children were taken from parents, husbands and wives were separated, brothers and sisters too. Why was this practice initiated? How did it impact families? Did the slave-owners feel any responsibility or remorse? And, after the Civil War, how did families scattered across the south try to reconnect?

Our guest today, Heather Williams, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a moving book about on the subject, Help Me Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery.

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Read Transcript...
Our topic today is going to be the family in slavery and in particular the emotional toll it took when slave owners decided to break up families. So could we start by talking about the family itself: how did families form in slave communities, were there restrictions?
Sure, there were lots of restrictions and, just so we understand, slavery meant that people were owned by other people and the people who owned them had incredible power over them. So for instance there was never any legal right for enslaved people to marry. They could not form a legal bond. There was, therefore, no legal divorce, however people got together and formed relationships that they considered marriage and that happened through a number of means. Sometimes two people would be attracted to each other and they would then have to go to their owner or owners to get permission to marry. Many marriages, many of the relationships happened across plantations or properties, so that the woman might be owned by one person and the man owned by somebody else. So the man would have to go his owner to ask permission and then he would have to go to her owner to ask permission. These adult people had to go to other people to get permission to get married and if they lived on different plantations the owners would agree on when the man can go to visit his wife and later the children as well. And typically you see in the sources that Wednesday was the day for this kind of movement and possibly on Sundays.

Other relationships came about because owners forced people together. It's really important, early in the 1600s in Virginia and then in subsequent colonies and states, laws established the fact that children would belong to the owner of the mother. So instead of the way that would have been in England, where it would have been determined by paternity, here it was determined through the mother. So when a man from one plantation was with a woman from another plantation there was no confusion about who owned the offspring. Slave owners encouraged people to get together and sometimes forced people to get together. There is testimony from women who say that, as a young girl I was put into a room with this man and I didn't understand what was happening and I didn't understand what was supposed to happen and he came towards me and I fought him off and then the owner said no you have to be with him. So there were those kinds of forced interactions but there were also consensual loving interactions.
Was childbearing encouraged or discouraged?
Childbearing was very much encouraged because you're reproducing property. So: I own this woman, and if she has ten children, now I own 11 people. It was very much encouraged and on the bigger plantations you would see that a woman who was pregnant might have some extra latitude. If she said she was feeling sick maybe she wouldn't to work or maybe she wouldn't be expected to work for a couple of weeks after the child was born. They really encourage it and they wanted the woman to have healthy children so over working the woman at that stage would not have been wise but still that happened sometimes because people think in the short term: "I need this crop brought in or I need this clothing made," and maybe a woman would be overworked and would miscarry.
Did religion play much of a role in life cycle events like marriage ceremonies or child bearing?
After, I would say by the mid 1800s, maybe early 1800s, many enslaved people became Christians, so at first they kind of resisted it. Many of them at that point were still coming from Africa and the kind of spiritual practices that they had brought with them. But with the " Great Awakening," there was more exposure to Christianity and more sort of acceptance of it and the idea that you could have this relationship with Christ, that you could even become an evangelist and become a preacher. I think for some people that created a space within slavery, a space of relative freedom, where you could think about a place where after this life was over, you'd be free. I've seen cases in which a woman, for instance, said "I wanted to get married to this man, but I kept holding out because I wanted a minister of the gospel to marry us," but there was no minister available so, she said, eventually a black man who was a kind of a vendor, moving around the landscape showed up and he performed the ceremony.

One of the things that many former slaves complained about was the fact that during their wedding ceremonies, nobody ever said those words from the traditional marriage vows: "what God has put together, let no man put asunder." And that was a clear indication to them that their marriages were not legal and that the owners didn't see them as sanctioned by God. I've seen marriage vows that one owner said that he used when he performed wedding ceremonies and he doesn't mention God anywhere. "I am gathered here with these people," and he goes through the whole ceremony and he never mentions god, and so they said we don't get that kind of religious blessing and there's no observance of the protection that the religious blessing would give us, so that our earthly master substitutes himself for the heavenly master. So religion, I think played out in the sense that people didn't get the protections that religion might have provided for them.
Before we talk about separating families, were there other ways that owners interfered in family life?
I think that putting people together was the big thing, having the right to say: yes, you can get married or not. Owners called it "abroad marriage," so if you lived on separate plantations, even though they might just be miles apart, we think of abroad as out of the country, but they called it "abroad marriages" and they really frowned on it because it reduced their control. You have a man from another plantation coming onto your property and some of the owners would write about this. "He's sitting around and he's off for more, and then your people, your slaves, are watching this and he's sending a bad example."

I think also one of the places where you see conflict is that owners expected obedience from all the people they owned, women, men, children. Parents expected obedience from their children, so you see that kind of conflict where a father would say to a child, "Yes, I know master called you but I called you at the same time and you have to come to me. But they're walking this tightrope because you want to protect your child so if the child doesn't respond to the owner, to the overseer, to the mistress, whoever, whichever person in power, that child might be in jeopardy. But the parent also wanted to establish some sense of power, to have some power over somebody. And so you see those kinds of conflicts where children had to make decisions and figure out how to navigate this system, in which the normal sort of family structures were not abided by because there was somebody else who had more authority that the people who normally would in a family.
You've written about the separation of families: what kinds of events led to the separation of family members?
Lots of events. Again, thinking about slavery as a property relationship, owners owned, so they owned land and they owned people and that's where their wealth lay, and it was much easier to get funds from the sale of a person, than from selling some real estate. So you might have a thousand acres, harder to carve it up, just harder to move that property, but if you were in debt, if you owed money, you could sell 10 people or 12 people or 5 people. So sale was one of the big ways and often around debt, like mortgages. Enslaved people could be used for a mortgage. You could go and get a loan from a bank and your collateral could be in people. If you failed to make a payment then the bank could come and seize those people. Just like today they could come and seize your car for instance, and that was another way in which people were separated.

Quite often, starting in about 1820s, you see a great migration from the upper south, places like North Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia, where tobacco cultivation had been the big cash crop and many enslaved people worked those tobacco fields. Well, tobacco fields started drying up, you can only plant tobacco for about 3 years and then the nutrients in the soil get used up and the land has to just lie idle or fallow for 20 years. So you have a lot of expansion but lots of land that you can't use. When you see this increase in cotton cultivation farther south and people moving from the upper south to the lower south to places like Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, white families, the slave owners, taking enslaved people with them to set up new plantations, new properties that would produce cotton-
And they would take parts of families?
They would break up families. So they might decide to take 100 of the slaves, not the other 100 or the other 50, and often those decisions would be based on age. You might want strong men in their 20s and women in their 20s, but you might not want 60 year olds, and so that would be a way to separate, but also husbands and wives, they just decided who they thought would do the best work, and who they wanted in that place, and so that would separate people.

Also the marriage of the children of slave owners, that was another time when you had separation, because an owner might own 100 people and give 15 of them to his daughter who got married, and she and her husband are moving to a new place, and those divisions would not necessarily be made in family groupings. Sometimes they were, so not everybody experienced separation, but that was not foremost in the owner's mind. The death of an owner - when an owner dies, slaves knew that there could be serious problems. Now that the person in charge is gone, everybody might be sold and that happened often, so through wills, people might be distributed to several members of the family. The sons come and they make a claim, and they divide people up by their value, so again if you're a "prime male hand," and that was the language that they used, a "prime hand," let's say between ages 17 and 26, you're worth more than a 14 year old or a 60 year old, and so that's how they would balance things out so that each heir would get a balanced proportion according to what the will had established. That meant sometimes that you get to go with your mother and sometimes you don't. Sometimes the family goes and sometimes not.

Those are some of the major ways in which separations happened but I've also seen cases where, for instance, a male cousin of the owner had children with an enslaved woman, and the family, the owner's family was very embarrassed, and so they sold the mother and the children so that they wouldn't have to always see that. Or the owner may have children with an enslaved woman and the wife is livid and just upset and to make things easier at home he would sell those people. In one particular case I'm thinking about with a cousin, the mother was sold with her two children, a boy and girl, so they were sold together and they were together for a while, but then they were broken up through another sale. Things could happen at the whim of somebody.

It's economics in most instances because that's what this about: property. And you had the right as owner to use your property as you saw fit, to sell your property as you saw fit.
From the owner's point of view this was an economic transaction. You've written very movingly about the emotional toll that this took on children and parents and family members. Could you talk about some of the children that you have discovered, their feelings?
The sources I have are from adults who recalled what their experiences were like as children and they remember becoming aware that something was happening and that was really important for me, because you think children are eavesdropping in families sometimes, you're looking around the corner you're hearing adult conversations, they start to hear that there's more tension in the home or in the slave community, the slave quarters, and people are upset. So for instance when an owner died, there was this increased level of anxiety and children started to realize for the first time that they are slaves, that that had some meaning, and that they could be sold. So the adults would be trying to figure out who's going to go with whom, what's going to happen. Then the day of the sale comes, or the day of the division of property for the heirs. People describe just really powerful scenes of pain and anguish as a mother is crying for her children and wishing, begging, pleading that the purchaser purchase her, somebody who is buying one her children to take her with them, or running after the cart as the children are being taken away. Very often the younger children have just become aware that they could be sold. They don't really know what that means. They don't know what separation means. They don't know what it implies, and so they're just kind of going along. I see children who got into the carriage with other children and the driver gives them candy or somebody is purchasing several children and has an old woman, an enslaved woman, and so they purchased a woman who's going to take care of these children, and so it's when the carriage pulls out and the mother is crying and screaming or days later when they get to this new environment and their mother's not there, there's nothing familiar, and they start to realize, "oh, something awful has happened." So you really see the changing circumstances in this kind of parting and they are starting to realize and becoming aware of what their circumstances were.

In some cases somebody took them in, in the slave community. So there might be this woman, there's one instance where somebody describes being in the carriage and the woman goes but there's never any sense that she was a caring, loving person, and you can imagine, she had been taken away from her own family, so this is a job for her. In other cases, somebody on the planation, a woman sometimes a man, took a child and said I'll take care of you. So somebody talks about this man who, I think, had been sold along with him and other people from his plantation, the man knew his father, and so had promised this boy's father that he would take care of the child. The man was a musician and so he would take the child with him at night when he was performing. So some of them you'd get this sense that somebody cared about them, somebody took care of them. Others, especially on the large plantations, were just sort of maybe living in a slave cabin with another family, not necessarily taken in, and so its hard sometimes to get at the nitty gritty of their daily lives, but you get the sense that it was very, very varied. Some continued to have a sense of love and caring even though they had lost the central people in their lives, and then other people you can sense were just kind of managing and trying to figure out what was going on and trying to blend in.
Do you have sources that describe the parents' experience of losing their children?
Yeah, a lot of that comes about through the children but also through the people who experience the loss, also descriptions from people who observed the loss taking place. So just really powerful stories. For instance, a woman who was being taken with a big group of slaves south, they called that a "coffee." The men generally would chained together, sometimes the women were not chained and the younger children, but they're part of this "coffee" and this was quite familiar.
When you say they were chained together, were they in a carriage or were they chained while they were walking?
No, they were walking and you can go to the museums in the Charleston, for instance, and you can see these chains that were manufactured and produced to hold people around the neck and connect them in that away or the legs, just as you would see prisoners being transported in jail sometimes or in a prison.

They're chained together so they can't run away. In the one case that I'm thinking about, someone wrote about the mother of an infant on the coffee, so they're going to a slave market, but somebody could stop and purchase people at any point, which again relates to separation, you don't know where the purchaser went. So the purchaser did not want the infant and according to this person who said she observed it, the slave trader took the baby aside and just killed the baby. Apparently the mother kind of lost her mind.

Some people were able to survive emotionally and physically, some people fell apart, so to have any vision of people just being always strong and always resilient is not an accurate vision. Many people are resilient and kept on going but other people just couldn't stop crying. There's a woman who said "they took my baby away and sometimes I can hear my son calling me and he says, 'mommy take me with you, take me with you.'" She says "I put my fingers in my ears because I don't want to hear him," and this was years after she had lost the child: "I just keep hearing him saying, 'mommy take me with you, mommy take me with you.'" People were just haunted by these losses and by this lack of control. I talked about the children of the owners' cousins, and the mother and her two children who were sold apart; at some point the mother sent a message to her son. Basically she knew a man, another enslaved person, who was going into town and that's where she had last seen her son. She wrapped up some beads, just blue beads in a piece of cloth, and sent it and said, "if you find my son give him these he'll know what to do." Once the son opened it and said this really is from my mother. He had been teaching himself how to read and write; he said I've always wanted to write in case I could run away. Because you needed to have a pass, a piece of paper with writing on it that said that you have permission to move about, because if you were black you were assumed to be a slave and you needed permission. So he went and found his mother, and she said, once I found out where you were, I tried to escape but I got beaten and I just can't do it anymore. He took paper and pen and wrote a pass for her to escape, and she said I just can't do it anymore. Her owner caught him and he was beaten and he was sent back to his proper owner. And so you've got all kinds of stories of a really wide range of experiences. Parents just talking for years about their children and trying to figure out where they were, searching for them, getting someone to write a letter back to where they had left the child to try to find some trace of the child.
Listening to you today talk about these experiences is really incredibly painful to think about, just to listen to you talk about them. Were there any slave owners who had any appreciation of, or how did they explain peoples' feelings as they stood there and watched as mothers screamed after their children? How did they justify this or did they just simply not understand what was going on? What did they think was going on?
As far as I can figure out, and this is a question that I took into the research, because I was aware that they're there, they're present...
They're doing it... they're creating this incredible anguish..
I can't account for everybody but most of them didn't ever say anything about it. So for instance there's a letter from a slave trader named Obeah Fields, and he was on the road selling people and conducting business. He wrote a letter back to his wife, he's headed south, she was in Virginia or Maryland, and at the top of the page, the first half of the letter, he's kind of telling her business information -so I have sold most of the slaves, the ones that I have left are - and he actually named the people - and so about 6 people, and he put information about the ones he had sold and how much he had sold them for and then something about buying a carriage and that kind of thing. Then at the bottom of the page he turned to more personal matters, and he expressed his deep love for his wife and his children and he sent his love to them, you know you could tell he really cared about them and loved his wife, and he said I'm sending you $20 to buy a new dress for yourself and I hope that I'll be back home at Christmas, in time for Christmas and I love you and he named children. And so in that document you see this division: he was selling people who inevitably were being separated from somebody unless they had already lost everybody and this was a second or third sale, they're at least being separated from the people they knew, but he never expressed any concern for them, but at the bottom you see him as a loving person. He was not just some brute. He loved his family, and in his short absence from his family he was missing them and hoping that he'd get back, but it's a short absence and it's an absence that he undertook, because it's business. And there you see that this is a person, this is a human, this is someone who has feelings, but he's not spending any of those feelings on these other people.
-or even appreciating their situation.
Exactly, he's not saying, oh they seem so sad when I sell them or the ones that are left just seem demoralized. Nothing. No acknowledgment at all of them as being other than property. He's eager to sell the rest of them because the faster he sells them, the sooner he can get back to his family. Thomas Chaplain, I think, is the slave owner who presents the most complete complex situation that I have come across. He was a slave owner in South Carolina, on St, Helena Island off the coast of South Carolina. At age 17 he inherited slaves and real estate property from his father, and so he was a young man, became a slave owner, got married. And at the time that I pick him up in 1845, he owns 70 people, but he was in debt and debt means people will be sold very often. So the sheriff was going to come and take possession of some of his slaves to sell them to pay his debts and he decided that instead of doing that he would sneak some people off the island and send them to the Charleston market to be sold so that he could make money from their sale and pay the debts and hopefully have some money left over. He'd be able to set a price for them. And in his journal, he wrote some of his feelings about doing this, and in one sentence he says, "it's a really terrible thing, it's an awful thing for me to have to sell some of these people, and it's no fault of their own and you don't know where they will end up, and separating families, mothers from children" -it's as though he's writing my book-"separating mothers from their children, fathers from their children..."
...He understands that's painful for them.
He understands very much that it's painful, it's going to hurt, but he says, "But i hope that they'll bring a good price in the market, and that I won't have to do this again," and in the journal as you trace his steps you can see that he's kind of hiding from the people. He names in the journal the 10 people he's decided to sell, and he brings somebody else in and sends that person down to the slave quarters to pull out those people and take them to the boat to take them to the mainland. He didn't go. He didn't go and face them, and then as they're getting on the boat, he's somewhere looking at them, but he's not down at the ship. I've actually been to the house that he lived in, and you can almost imagine him peeking through the window, the curtains were there and he had view and he didn't want to be there. And then a few days later he wrote in the journal that the people who were left behind, the families were disconsolate, they were just sad, they could not be consoled about the loss of these people. And he says but it will soon blow over, maybe they'll see their children again, and he says something more about money and getting the money and hopefully being satisfied. And so as you go through the journal, you see messages coming back saying that these three have been sold, and then this one has been sold, and you don't see anymore about the other three, and so they're in Charleston, the thriving market in Charleston, and being taken probably to a rice plantation or a cotton plantation, but you just don't know.

So here with Chaplain, you see somebody who in some sense is struggling very much with this idea of selling people, but he's also struggling with settling with his loss of mastery. He's not fully in charge of his situation, he shouldn't be in this kind of position, and you see him going back and forth like that, and some people are skeptical of the ideas that he wrote at that point. His expression of concern about the slaves, but when I go to his original journal, which is in the archives in Charleston, you see that its hand written, he wrote these words in 1845. Then after the Civil War ended and he want back through the journal and annotated certain entries, for those days in 1845 he wrote "if only i had known that the negroes would be so ungrateful, as to leave after the war, I would have, and many of us would have put them in our pockets in the first place, wouldn't have been so concerned about their feelings." So here he's saying during the Civil War, all the slave owners, all the white people from St. Helena fled the island when the Union soldiers were within miles of the place. He turned to one of his slaves and said take care of the place for me, but when he came back after the war, they were all gone, nobody stuck around. They're now free, what they were waiting for, but he was resentful of that and he says "if i had know that they would not be loyal to me, I wouldn't have wasted my time in 1845 feeling sorry that I was selling them. I would've put them in my pocket, meaning I would have sold them all and had that cash to put in my pocket. So for me that says the feelings of remorse that he expressed earlier were true feelings and that now he was regretting those feelings, but that he had those feelings. All those pieces kind of come together because I'm trying to figure out who these people are, who the enslaved people are, what are they thinking, and who somebody like Chaplain was, and what he was thinking. It can be complicated and sometimes people want to say, well they were just terrible people but here with Obadiah Fields [and Thomas Chaplain] it's more complicated. They're people who had feelings - and his case, which really is an extraordinary case - I have not come across somebody else like that. Thomas Jefferson, who of course was the third President, but also a big slave holder in Virginia, wrote that the negroes are not like us, they're not as intelligent as us, they can't write real poetry, they don't feel deeply, their griefs are fleeting, their griefs are transient is what he said. It doesn't last long. So he's saying they don't feel deeply but in a letter when he was president he wrote back to the overseer at the plantation and said one of his slaves who had been accused of I think killing somebody, another slave, and he said "if they don't lock him up, then I want you to sell him to Georgia, because nothing is more painful to those slaves as being separated from their families. So he knows the pain, he knows that they'll grieve but in a big tome that he was sending to the world he says, oh but they don't feel deeply. The things that make white people suffer, it just washes right over them
People are full of contradictions...
Yes, yes
You started this project when you discovered a large number of people looking for, searching for their family members they'd been separated from, and they put ads in newspapers?
Yes, that's what got me started on the project because I was doing research and looking through black newspapers in the south and started coming across these ads. You go through the paper and it's just like today, you have a section with news, maybe editorials, and then you get to a page with ads, and they're advertising hoop skirts and tobacco and all kinds of miracle medicines and then you see these ads and they're just really powerful and poignant. People looking for family members who they had lost decades earlier and they tell you as much information as they had. Her name was Bettie, and we were sold by Colonel so-and-so from Virginia. And I was taken here and very often they named their owner, they named the traders, because they knew that those were more powerful people than they were and so somebody might remember that Col Johnson's people went to New Orleans or went to Savannah. They're hoping that you'll recognize their name, the name of the family members they're looking for, the names of the people who had sold them or had somehow been involved in the slave trade. Many of them were in a newspaper called the Christian Reporter, which is from the AME church. Especially in those but in some of the others there would be a note that said, "ministers of the church, please read this aloud" because in that way even if only one newspaper came into a community or if only a few people were literate enough to read an ad, if you read it aloud in church, maybe 100 people would hear it and then those people would leave and talk to other people. They're calling on the mechanisms within their communities to get the word out. They didn't have the kind of facilities that we have. They didn't have the internet...
It's not that different than holding up a picture on the internet saying, "help me find..."
Yeah, September 11th people leaving these pictures and letters and notes in Manhattan because you don't know where your family member is, you don't know if that person made it out.

So people paid money to have these ads run in newspapers. These are very poor people; they're just emerging from slavery. Some offered rewards, not many did, but some did, and when you read you know it's a husband looking for his wife and his children, it's a wife looking for her husband, it's a sister looking for her siblings. One man was just looking for any friends, anybody who might know him because he's been displaced, sold and sold and sold, so just really powerful. Some people, a woman named Outlaw, she was at that time in Raleigh, and she named about 12 children, so she had lost that many children. She had all the names of the children and she just wanted to hear something from one of them. You see also evidence that some people had managed to keep in touch for a while, had heard word maybe, and then an enslaved person who worked for a slave trader came back up that route and told them you know we dropped that person off in New Orleans. In some of the ads you'll see, I remember one where it said her daughter had been sold I think from Virginia and had been taken to this place and then had been taken to Cuba and then to Texas and then the trail went cold. At this point she just trying to say you may have seen her in one of these places, can you tell me any information you have. Slavery ended in 1865. The separations had taken place before that, but I see these ads in the newspapers until 1903, so people were still holding on to hope that they could find family members even though I guess they figured I'm still alive maybe that person's still alive.
Do you have any evidence of people who found family members?
From the ads, I have one notice. It was in a church paper from Dallas, saying that somebody had placed an ad in the paper and had just announced in church that she had found a relative, but when I went to find the original ad I couldn't find it. Outside of the ads, through all kinds of circumstances, I did see people who found each other. Sometimes people just walked back to the place where they had last seen family and the people were still there, but sometimes they weren't there. Sometimes somebody recognized someone: do you have a brother in Cleveland, well I don't know. I used to have a brother but I don't know where he is because we were sold apart. Then through a series of messages and interventions they were able to find each other, but they were now adults and they had hadn't seen each other since they were children and one of the brothers had lost a finger at some point and that was the marker that let them know.

When some people did find each other there could be all kinds of complications. If you had been married and you're still looking for your wife or your husband, and you find the person but the person is now married to somebody else. Or children didn't recognize the parent because they just didn't remember them. Or a mother is looking and in her head she has always been looking and thinking about her 8 year old, but now that 8 year old is a 25 year old. How will you recognize each other, and once you do, so much has changed. A child has now been raised by somebody else and the mother might have different kinds of expectations of behavior and so it could be quite complicated. Unfortunately I don't get many details about what life was like. They tell you about the big moment about reunification, but then they don't tell you the daily adjustments that had to take place.
This is a story that has a lot of dangling ends, really open ended history. I mean, in a way, as historians all of us are writing stories that aren't really finished, because the documents just don't tell us everything we want to know. But this is such an open ended history, I wonder if that made it harder for you to write or more interesting, or if you thought about that while you were writing it?
Yeah, it makes it very interesting, sometimes frustrating, because I get bits and pieces. I get fragments. Somebody enters the record, the historical record, for a moment, and then I can't find any trace of that person. So I have to put several stories together, but I can't tell you how this person's story was resolved. I was talking to some people earlier about fiction, historical fiction, and history, and what some of the difference are, and one of the things that I thought about, is that with fiction you create your story and you can tie up lots of loose ends. You can tell me what happened. This husband's been looking for his wife for 20 years and they realize... you can tell a story. As a historian it can be frustrating but it's also maybe, it's certainly more realistic, that we don't always know what happens, when we go poking around in the past, but we never know everything. We know what some documents present to us. Even if you're writing about somebody like Thomas Jefferson or George Washington for whom there are reams and reams of documents, there's so much that you can never know, so much that they didn't write down, so much that they were feeling that they never said. We all have behaviors that we can't explain and so going into the past you can never know everything. I think it's tempting to want to, and its tempting to pretend that you do but certainly doing this kind of work you're just very aware that you never can. I can never speak for black people, I can never speak for all white people, I can never tell you everything about everybody. Even with one particular individual I'm aware that there's just a lot I don't have access to. Mostly I'm ok with that but sometimes it's sad, you wish you had more of a person's story and you just don't.
You also write about how when you go around talking about your work that people tell you that it sounds like things that they're familiar with. As a Russian historian the first thing I thought about was after World War II and up until today, on Victory Day you hear on the radio people still looking for each other decades and decades later. You mentioned Native American children who are separated from their families, and Nazi holocaust survivors. I'm wondering if you have thoughts about the differences between those situations and slavery. Is there something different about the situation of North American slavery and the kinds of separations that took place or the kinds of searching that people did or the kind of regime that it was. Are there are things about this story that differentiate it from those or do you see it as a universal?
Well I see forced separations as universal. You've named some of the contexts, but I see probably each of the circumstances as different and so certainly say with Nazi Germany I've been told that in Israel there was a radio program for many decades where people were looking for family members. But those separations happened within a particular time period. With this it happened in a particular time period, but over a very long period of time and so people who were searching after the war were searching for people whom they'd lost in their lifetimes but their [slaves'] parents may have lost people, their parents may have been sold from one place to another so it was something that was repeating in families but also just maybe not in your particular family. It was part of an experience of these people throughout slavery, escalating in the antebellum period so say the period of the 40 or 50 years before the Civil War and the end of slavery. And so I think it's something that people in some ways had to adjust to. I think that that's one of the things about us as humans is we adjust to all kinds of horrible things and so people would be sent somewhere and the assumption was that they would be married for instance, the your husband is essentially dead, you may not even know where he is. There's a man whose wife had been sent to another part of the state miles and miles away, taken by her owners, he belongs to somebody else. His mistress, or his owners' wife, was writing letters for him and said that this was probably the last letter because master says it's only painful for you [the wife] and painful for me to have these letters going back and forth but it's not going to help anything. He's not going to send me there to live so I'll try to get your owner to send you back here with the children. He said master says I should just find another person and he says you know people tell me that many of these colored women would be happy with me, but I'm not interested. But if I should ever do that then I would let you know. So you see him standing at this crossroads in his life: What do I do? Am i ever going to see her again? Am I ever going to see my children again? And that is one of those rare, rare situations where I found that letter documenting the separation and the separation actually took place in 1863, during the Civil War. It was after the Emancipation Proclamation, but the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free most people, so they were still owned by people. In 1870, -the war ended 1865 - in the 1870 census, I found him, Tate is his last name, living in household with a woman. In the letter he just said my dear wife, he never called her by name, but it's a woman who's about his age. Then he named his children in the letter, he said give my love to my children, he named them, and those children were also in the household. So that's a place where I see reunification take place because the separation had occurred so close to the end of slavery. But at the time he didn't know, she didn't know, that slavery was going to be over. They didn't know who was going to win the war. So I think making these kinds of adjustments and deciding to go on living, for most people. Some people as I said just fell apart and could not go on, went into a deep depression. I've seen descriptions of that, they didn't use that language, but what they described is called depression.

So it's hard to compare to these others situations but I think the long term nature of it is significant. Stories passed down in families about separations that had taken place before, show that was part of what people knew could happen. Once you leave childhood, it just kind of looms. As a young child you're not aware of what's going to happen, what could happen, and, as I said, separation did not occur for everybody but it was always a possibility because they did not control what would happen.
You've really given us a good sense of how pervasive the threat of separation was and how much it was woven into the culture of the experience of an enslaved people. Thank you so much for coming in and talking to us about this.
My pleasure, thank you.

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Episode 88: The Search for Family Lost in Slavery

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Read Transcript... Our topic today is going to be the family in slavery and in particular the emotional toll it took when slave owners decided to break up families. So could we start by talking about the family itself: how did families form in slave communities, were there restrictions?

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What makes us who we are? How do parents mold children into who they are? In this hour, TED speakers reflect on how our upbringing shapes us.

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What makes us who we are? How do parents mold children into who they are? In this hour, TED speakers reflect on how our upbringing shapes us.

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Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there's one thing nobody tries anymore, despite lots of evidence that it works: desegregation. Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at a district that, not long ago, accidentally launched a desegregation program.

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Norman Rockwell's "The Problem We All Live With," depicting Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to attend an all white elementary school in the South.

Artwork approved by The Norman Rockwell Family Agency.

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Multnomah County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson Discusses Preschool For All

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Host of The Early Link Podcast, Rafael Otto, talks with Multnomah County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson about her recently released Preschool For All report that explores how to provide preschool for all families in the county.

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Multnomah County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson Discusses Preschool For All by Children's Institute

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Host of The Early Link Podcast, Rafael Otto, talks with Multnomah County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson about her recently released Preschool For All report that explores how to provide preschool for all families in the county.

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Soobin Oh Discusses Anti-Bias Education in Early Childhood

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Soobin Oh Discusses Anti-Bias Education in Early Childhood

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In this week’s episode, host Rafael Otto speaks with Soobin Oh about the importance of anti-bias education in early childhood. Soobin Oh is the senior education advisor at Children’s Institute. He is a committed social justice educator and is well-versed in anti-bias education, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and critical pedagogy. Soobin holds a master’s in early childhood inclusive curriculum and instruction from Portland State University (PSU) and is working towards his Ed.D. in curriculum and instruction at PSU with a research focus on social justice in early childhood education.

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Soobin Oh Discusses Anti-Bias Education in Early Childhood by Children's Institute

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In this week’s episode, host Rafael Otto speaks with Soobin Oh about the importance of anti-bias education in early childhood. Soobin Oh is the senior education advisor at Children’s Institute. He is a committed social justice educator and is well-versed in anti-bias education, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and critical pedagogy. Soobin holds a master’s in early childhood inclusive curriculum and instruction from Portland State University (PSU) and is working towards his Ed.D. in curriculum and instruction at PSU with a research focus on social justice in early childhood education.

Definitions:

Institutional Bias is the tendency of institutions to advantage and favor certain groups of people while other groups are disadvantaged or devalued. 

Explicit Bias is attitudes and beliefs of individuals about other people or groups of people on a conscious level. 

Implicit Bias is attitudes and beliefs of individuals about other people or groups of people on an unconscious level. Implicit bias is a problem for educators because it can come into play in a classroom without intent.

A Tourist Curriculum is a superficial educational approach that does not make diversity a routine part of the ongoing, daily learning environment. Instead, it is curriculum that “drops in” on strange, exotic people to see their holidays and taste their foods, and then returns to the “real” world of “regular” life. Essentially it treats non-western cultures as “other.”

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Dr. Robin Leake: Child Welfare and COVID-19: Ensuring safety and well-being in a global pandemic

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Dr. Robin Leake: Child Welfare and COVID-19: Ensuring safety and well-being in a global pandemic

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Dr. Robin Leake - Project Director for National Child Welfare Workforce Initiative (NCWWI) discusses how social workers are navigating the impact of the Coronavirus on child welfare systems, the people they serve, and the workers who serve them. She details how workers are attending to their core mission, how they are supporting families, and how they are struggling with the impact on their own lives as they adapt to the severe disruptions the pandemic has introduced.

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Subscribe:

Welcome back! In this episode, our guest Dr. Robin Leake - Project Director for National Child Welfare Workforce Initiative (NCWWI) discusses how social workers are navigating the impact of the Coronavirus on child welfare systems, the people they serve, and the workers who serve them. She details how workers are attending to their core mission, how they are supporting families, and how they are struggling with the impact on their own lives as they adapt to the severe disruptions the pandemic has introduced.

​Robin Leake, Ph.D. is a Research Associate Professor, and the Acting Executive Director of the Butler Institute of Families at the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work. Dr. Leake has over 20 years of experience in social science, intervention research evaluation with an emphasis on implementation of trauma-informed practice, and organizational workforce development in child welfare. Dr. Leake is the Project Director for the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute (NCWWI) and the co-Principal Investigator for the Children's Bureau Capacity Building Center for Tribes.
APA (6th ed) citation for this podcast:
Episode 283 - Dr. Robin Leake: Child Welfare and COVID-19: Ensuring safety and well-being in a global pandemic. (2020, June 2). inSocialWork® Podcast Series. [Audio Podcast] Retrieved from http://www.insocialwork.org/episode.asp?ep=283
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inSocialWork Podcast #283 - Dr. Robin Leake: Child Welfare and COVID-19: Ensuring safety and well-being in a global pandemic

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Welcome back! In this episode, our guest Dr. Robin Leake - Project Director for National Child Welfare Workforce Initiative (NCWWI) discusses how social workers are navigating the impact of the Coronavirus on child welfare systems, the people they serve, and the workers who serve them.

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Ending Slavery and Child Labor in Global Supply Chains

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Ending Slavery and Child Labor in Global Supply Chains

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Human trafficking, modern slavery, and child labor remain pressing concerns in many industries’ global supply chains. Harvard’s Siddharth Kara leads a discussion on how each sector can play a role in finding solutions.

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In the mid-1990s, NGO activists began shining a spotlight on the concentrated use of slave child labor in Pakistan to produce soccer balls for the global market. The attention prompted the industry to make deep changes in its supply chain to eliminate the problem. Today, the campaign is viewed as a model for improving labor standards, with the gains a result of government, NGO, and donor involvement.

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Ending Slavery and Child Labor in Global Supply Chains (SSIR)

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In the mid-1990s, NGO activists began shining a spotlight on the concentrated use of slave child labor in Pakistan to produce soccer balls for the global market. The attention prompted the industry to make deep changes in its supply chain to eliminate the problem.

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Sesame Workshop, Winner of 100&Change Grant Competition, Discusses What’s Next

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Sesame Workshop, Winner of 100&Change Grant Competition, Discusses What’s Next

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In 2016, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, launched 100&Change—a new grant competition, to award $100 million to an organization with the best proposal to help solve a critical social problem. In 2018, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces Sesame Street and other children’s educational programs, was named the winner in partnership with the International Rescue Committee. The grant supports programming to educate young children displaced by conflict and persecution in the Middle East.

In this episode, Priss Benbow, a fellow at Stanford’s Distinguished Careers Institute, speaks with Sherrie Westin, president of Global Impact and Philanthropy at Sesame Workshop, about the process of applying to a “big bet” grant competition, developing new culturally appropriate Sesame Street characters, and how the two partner organizations will measure program impact.

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In 2016, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, launched 100&Change-a new grant competition, to award $100 million to an organization with the best proposal to help solve a critical social problem. In 2018, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces Sesame Street and other children's educational programs, was named the winner in partnership with the International Rescue Committee. The grant supports programming to educate young children displaced by conflict and persecution in the Middle East.

In this episode, Priss Benbow, a fellow at Stanford's Distinguished Careers Institute, speaks with Sherrie Westin, president of Global Impact and Philanthropy at Sesame Workshop, about the process of applying to a "big bet" grant competition, developing new culturally appropriate Sesame Street characters, and how the two partner organizations will measure program impact.

On our next episode, you'll hear from Cecilia Conrad, who leads 100&Change, to get the grantmaker's perspective.

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Sesame Workshop, Winner of 100&Change Grant Competition, Discusses What's Next (SSIR)

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In 2016, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, launched 100&Change-a new grant competition, to award $100 million to an organization with the best proposal to help solve a critical social problem. In 2018, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces Sesame Street and other children's educational programs, was named the winner in partnership with the International Rescue Committee.

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Tween Pop Children’s Music and Public Culture 

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Tween Pop Children’s Music and Public Culture 

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New Books in Sociology May 5 2020

In his new book, Tween Pop: Children’s Music and Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2020), Tyler Bickford explores how the tween music market rose during the mid to late 2000s. Bickford addresses the ways in which the music industry seized only childishness as a key element in legitimizing children’s participation in public culture.

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In his new book, Tween Pop: Children's Music and Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2020), Tyler Bickford explores how the tween music market rose during the mid to late 2000s. Bickford addresses the ways in which the music industry seized only childishness as a key element in legitimizing children's participation in public culture. Starting with how Kidz Bop and Disney's High School Musical (2006), Bickford argues that tween music culture flourished due to the commodification of childhood and the rise of television and pop music stars. Focusing on the ways that femininity and whiteness are markers are innocence and childhood, Bickford examines Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana through a postfeminist discourse of work life balance, Taylor Swift's longstanding relationship with girlhood and whiteness, and Justin Bieber's label as child prodigy as a way to cement his position as a super star. In outlining how tween pop imagined and positioned childhood as both intimate and public as well as a cultural identity to be marketed to, Bickford demonstrates the importance of children's music to core questions of identity politics, consumer culture, and the public sphere.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Tyler Bickford, "Tween Pop: Children's Music and Public Culture" (Duke UP, 2020)

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In his new book, Tween Pop: Children's Music and Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2020), Tyler Bickford explores how the tween music market rose during the mid to late 2000s. Bickford addresses the ways in which the music industry seized only childishness as a key element in legitimizing children's participation in public culture.

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The Beginning of Life Series Episode 1 Fantastic Baby (2016) 

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The Beginning of Life Series Episode 1 Fantastic Baby (2016) 

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An infant is a little scientist built to learn, with no preconceived notions of the world. The human interactions he or she takes in are essential.

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The Beginning of Life: The Series | Netflix

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Using breakthroughs in technology and neuroscience, this series examines how environment affects infants -- and how infants can affect our future.