The Parent Trap by Nate G Hilger

The Parent Trap by Nate G Hilger

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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780262545945
ISBN 10	0262545942
Title	The Parent Trap
Author	Nate G Hilger
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	MIT Press Ltd
Year published	2023-04-04
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.