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Children and family

Arts in Society

Caring in Viral Times

Indifference toward the most vulnerable has driven the death toll of COVID-19, just as it did during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Against this backdrop, even small acts of kindness can make a difference.

Michael McColly

Politics, Race

America’s Long War on Children and Families

A new book shows how Trump’s family separation policy belongs to a much longer history of U.S. government forces—alongside state and local entities—taking children from families deemed inimical to the idealized American family form.

Paul M. Renfro

Reading Lists

Incarcerated Fathers. Trans Fathers. Founding Fathers.

An alternative father’s day reading list.

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Class & Inequality

The End of Family Values

Neoliberalism rests on the myth that “good” families can provide for their own without public support. COVID-19 may finally change all that.

Julie Kohler

Class & Inequality

High Stakes Tests Aren't Better—And They Never Will Be

Accountability is important. But tests that tie school funding to student performance only make things worse.

Lelac Almagor

Gender & Sexuality

Secularism’s Saints

Two recent books about Mormon women highlight the success of the church in redefining itself as a modern liberal religion. But to become that, the Latter-day Saints dramatically reworked both their theology and history.

Peter Coviello

Gender & Sexuality, Law & Justice

‘Flexible’ Family Leave Is Lousy Feminism

Balancing work-life pressures is often considered the holy grail, but men can still opt out of these policies. To move the needle on gender inequality, the state needs to take more coercive action. 

Gina Schouten

Race

What White Kids Learn About Race in School

Sixty-five years after Brown v. Board of Education, U.S. schools remain largely segregated. This matters not only because white and black students experience very different educational outcomes, but also because school is where children form many of their ideas about race and privilege.

Erik Loomis

Arts in Society

The Precarity of Black Motherhood

Jordan Peele's ‘Us’ depicts the terrors faced by black mothers in a way that owes as much to Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ as it does to classic Hollywood horror. 

Tao Leigh Goffe

Gender & Sexuality, Science & Nature

Who's Your Daddy?

The meaning of fatherhood remains elusive, even in the age of DNA-based paternity testing.

Nara Milanich

Gender & Sexuality, Reading Lists

Abortion’s Past and Future

“I was a teenager back then, pregnant and desperate. Too terrified to make the midnight trip to the back alley.”

Matt Lord, Boston Review

Class & Inequality

Teaching Citizenship

Education’s most important job is to teach students to take an active role in their democracy, starting in their own communities.

Albert W. Dzur

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