Family Sociology

Journalist Lauren Sandler is an only child and the mother of one. After investigating what only children are really like and whether stopping at one child is an answer to reconciling motherhood and modernity, she learned a lot about herself - and a lot about our culture's assumptions. In this heartfelt work, Sandler legitimizes a discussion about the larger societal costs of having more than one.

Do you feel like your life is an endless to-do list? Do you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through Instagram because you’re too exhausted to pick up a book? Are you mired in debt, or feel like you work all the time, or feel pressure to take whatever gives you joy and turn it into a monetizable hustle? Welcome to burnout culture. While burnout may seem like the default setting for the modern era, in Can’t Even, BuzzFeed culture writer and former academic Anne Helen Petersen argues that burnout is a definitional condition for the millennial generation.

In his extraordinary new audiobook, Terrence Real, distinguished therapist and best-selling author, offers women a set of effective tools with which they can create the truly intimate relationships they desire and deserve. He guides you through the process of relationship repair with exercises that you can do alone or with your partner.

Half of all marriages end. Unfortunately, about 20% of divorces are high-conflict, involving frequent visits to court, allegations of abuse, and chronic disagreements regarding parenting schedules. In response to this conflict, some children become aligned with one parent against the other - even a parent who has done nothing to warrant the hostile rejection of their formerly loving children. These parents are on a painful journey with an uncertain outcome. Surviving Parental Alienation fills the tremendous need for concrete help for these parents.

In The Two-Parent Privilege, Melissa S. Kearney makes a data-driven case for marriage by showing how the institution's decline has led to a host of economic woes—problems that have fractured American society and rendered vulnerable populations even more vulnerable.

Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man's home has never been his castle, the "male breadwinner marriage" is the least traditional family in history, and rape and sexual assault were far higher in the 1970s than they are today. In The Way We Never Were, acclaimed historian Stephanie Coontz examines two centuries of the American family, sweeping away misconceptions about the past that cloud current debates about domestic life. The 1950s do not present a workable model of how to conduct our personal lives today, Coontz argues.

Capitalist ideology wants us to believe that there is an optimal way to live. "Making connections" means networking for work. Our emotional needs are to be fulfilled by a single romantic partner, and self-care equates to taking personal responsibility for our suffering. We must be productive and heteronormative; we must have babies and buy a house. But the kicker is most people cannot and do not want to achieve all or any of these life goals. Instead, we are left feeling atomized, exhausted, and disempowered. Radical Intimacy shows that it doesn't need to be this way.

If you're looking to get married and you're not, there's most likely a very good reason: you. Not that you're a bad person - you're certainly not! It's just that you haven't yet become the woman you need to be in order to have the partnership you want. So how can you grow into someone who is ready to say "I do" and to attract the same in a mate? You start with this book. Based on her wildly popular Huffington Post article, Why You're Not Married . . . Yet dishes out straightforward, no-holds-barred advice for women.

We can find oneness in meditation, in community, or in awe at the beauty around us. Another option: psychedelic medicines that can catalyze a connection with the self, with nature, or the cosmos. Good Chemistry points us on the right path to forging true and deeper attachments with our own souls, to one another, and even to our planet, helping us heal ourselves and our world.

Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross created her classic seminal work, On Death and Dying, to offer us a new perspective on the terminally ill. It is not a psychoanalytic study, nor is it a "how-to" manual for managing death. Rather, it refocuses on the patient as a human being and a teacher, in the hope that we will learn from him or her about the final stages of life.

An anthology that gives access to the voices of mothers of color and marginalized mothers.

Where the Wild Things Were centers on the exploding, contentious national conversation about the nature of childhood and parenting in the postwar US emblematized by Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care. Renowned scholar Henry Jenkins demonstrates that the language that shaped a growing field of advice literature for parents also informed the period's fictions—in film, television, and elsewhere—produced for and consumed by children.

Women who opt not to be mothers are frequently warned that they will regret their decision later in life, yet we rarely talk about the possibility that the opposite might also be true - that women who have children might regret it. Drawing on years of research interviewing women from a variety of socioeconomic, educational, and professional backgrounds, sociologist Orna Donath treats regret as a feminist issue: as regret marks the road not taken, we need to consider whether alternative paths for women currently are blocked off.

"L'infidélité" est un phénomène à la fois courant et tabou : on la pratique mais on la tait ! Selon des études méthodologiques européennes et américaines, 20 à 30 % des hommes et 15 à 20 % des femmes auraient eu des relations sexuelles extraconjugales. Yvon Dallaire, dans ce texte bref mais fulgurant, mène une analyse fine et intelligente de l'infidélité : quelle est la réalité de l'infidélité ? À quoi reconnaît-on l'infidèle ? Quelles sont les idées préconçues portant sur ce phénomène ? Pourquoi devient-on infidèle ? Et à qui la faute ? Le couple peut-il survivre à l'infidélité ?

Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home; and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing the pros and cons of having children, millennials and zoomers are finding it increasingly difficult to judge in its favor. With lucid argument and passionate prose, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer the guidance necessary to move beyond uncertainty.

We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a 'global epidemic'. In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don't know we're seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths....

In 1994, Dr. John Gottman and his colleagues at the University of Washington made a startling announcement: Through scientific observation and mathematical analysis, they could predict, with more than 90-percent accuracy, whether a marriage would succeed or fail. The only thing they did not yet know was how to turn a failing marriage into a successful one, so Gottman teamed up with his clinical psychologist wife, Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, to develop intervention methods.

In this extraordinary audiobook, Terrence Real, distinguished therapist and best-selling author, offers women a set of effective tools with which they can create the truly intimate relationships they desire and deserve. He guides you through the process of relationship repair with exercises that you can do alone or with your partner.

Some 75% of American families want their kids to play sports. Athletics are training grounds for character, friendship, and connection; at their best, sports insulate kids from hardship and prepare them for adult life. But youth sports have changed so dramatically over the last 25 years that they no longer deliver the healthy outcomes everyone wants. Instead, unbeknownst to most parents, kids who play competitive organized sports are more likely to burn out or suffer from overuse injuries than to develop their characters or build healthy habits.

After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong "hill women" who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region - an uplifting and eye-opening memoir for fans of Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.