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The After-School Lives of Children: Alone and with Others while Parents Work.reviewed by David Bensman - 2001 Title: The After-School Lives of Children: Alone and with Others while Parents Work. Author(s): Deborah Belle Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Mahwah, NJ ISBN: 0805823255, Pages: 197, Year: 1999 Search for book at Amazon.com "Latchkey kids" is a profoundly
ideological concept, calling up images of lonely children growing
up without nurturance, affection, and supervision. According to the
"family values" discourse to which this concept is central,
latchkey kids will grow up to be emotionally undeveloped,
culturally impoverished, socially unskilled and disaffected, and
educationally marked for failure. Blame is easily assigned –
it’s America’s spiritual decay, the decline of "family
values" that has produced broken families, single parents, adults
who don’t understand and value the role of parenting and
instead narcissistically pursue their own careers, and finally
inadequate mothers who abandon hearth and home in the unnatural
pursuit of material wealth and personal self-aggrandizement.
This discourse has grown so strong in the backlash against the
feminism of the 1960’s and 1970’s that nearly everyone
accepts at least some of its premises. Millions of working moms
torture themselves with guilt when they return home exhausted from
their paid jobs to begin their second shift. Thousands of parents
send their children to inadequate after-school programs... (preview truncated at 150 words.)To view the full-text for this article you must be signed-in with the appropriate membership. Please review your options below:
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- David Bensman
Rutgers University E-mail Author David Bensman is a Professor at Rutgers University. He studies American labor history, education reform, and the impact of global economic integration on working people. He is the author of Central Park East and Its Graduates: Learning by Heart (Teachers College Press, 2000), Rusted Dreams: Hard Times in a Steel Community (McGraw-Hill, 1987) and Practice of Solidarity: American Hat Finishers in the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 1985).
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