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Title details for The Parent Trap by Nate G. Hilger - Available

The Parent Trap

How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis

by Nate G. Hilger
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How parents have been set up to fail, and why helping them succeed is the key to achieving a fair and prosperous society.
Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers—parents—labor in isolation. If they ask for help, they are made to feel inadequate; there is no centralized organization to represent their interests; and there is virtually nothing spent on research and development to help them achieve their goals. It’s almost as if parents are set up to fail—and the result is lost opportunities that limit children’s success and make us all worse off. In The Parent Trap, Nate Hilger combines cutting-edge social science research, revealing historical case studies, and on-the-ground investigation to recast parenting as the hidden crucible of inequality.
 
Parents are expected not only to care for their children but to help them develop the skills they will need to thrive in today’s socioeconomic reality—but most parents, including even the most caring parents on the planet, are not trained in skill development and lack the resources to get help. How do we fix this? The solution, Hilger argues, is to ask less of parents, not more. America should consider child development a public investment with a monumental payoff. We need a program like Medicare—call it Familycare—to drive this investment. To make it happen, parents need to organize to wield their political power on behalf of children—who will always be the largest bloc of disenfranchised people in this country. 
 
The Parent Trap exposes the true costs of our society’s unrealistic expectations around parenting and lays out a profoundly hopeful blueprint for reform.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 26, 2022

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780262369015

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780262369015
      • File size: 785 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      February 1, 2022

      Outside of their own work, parents in the United States provide unpaid around-the-clock child-development services to more than 74 million children each year. According to Hilger (economics, Brown Univ.), if these services were provided at market value, the sum of output would be more than $5 trillion a year. Here he argues that the U.S. should consider child development a public investment or an entitlement like Medicare; he proposes "Familycare," with a centralized organization, funding for research, and federal aid to parents. Parents who are isolated or don't have access to parenting guidance or skill building--especially women, non-white people, and impoverished people--are at a disadvantage and often face compounding inequity, which further impacts the children they raise. For instance, a child raised by parents who are in the U.S.'s wealthiest 25 percent will, when they're an adult, earn an average of $50,000 more, each year, than a person raised by parents in the poorest 25 percent. VERDICT This analytical tome may be better for those in public policy than for parents themselves; nonetheless Hilger makes a compelling argument for federal investment in child-rearing.

      Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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