Full Description
In developing countries, concerns about declining fertility rates are matched only by fears that childhood is being destroyed by modern parenting practices. This timely volume brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to provide a more balanced, less alarmist perspective on the meanings and implications of these developments.
Contrary to predictions about the end of children and the end of childhood, these investigations of developments in Canada and the United States, and to a lesser extent elsewhere in the world, show that fertility rates and ideas about children and childhood are not uniform but rather vary around the globe based on factors such as time, culture, class, income, and age. By exploring the influences that inform when and why people have children and how they choose to raise them, The End of Children? opens a new dialogue on the idea and place of children in modern society.
Contents
Introduction / Nathanael Lauster and Graham Allan
1 Fertility Change in North America, 1950-2000 / Mira Whyman, Megan Lemmon, and Jay Teachman
2 Changing Children and Changing Cultures: Immigration as a Source of Fertility and the Assumptions of Assimilation / Nathanael Lauster, Todd F. Martin, and James M. White
3 Using Infertility, Useful Fertility: Cultural Imperatives on the Value of Children in the United States / Rebecca L. Upton
4 The Performance of Motherhood and Fertility Decline: A Stage Props Approach / Nathanael Lauster
5 Parenthood, Immortality, and the End of Childhood / Nicholas W. Townsend
6 Leaving Home: An Example of the Disappearance of Childhood and Its End as a Predictable Set of Uniform Experiences / Adena B.K. Miller
7 The Disappearance of Parents from Children's Lives: The Cumulative Effects of Child Care, Child Custody, and Child Welfare Policies in Canada / Edward Kruk
8 Navigating the Pedagogy of Failure: Medicine, Education, and the Disabled Child in English Canada, 1900-45 / Mona Gleason
9 Pathologizing Childhood / Anita Ilta Garey
Conclusion: From Children to Child: Ending in China / Jing Zhao, Nathanael Lauster, and Graham Allan
Index
