Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, evangelical leaders and conservative politicians developed a political agenda that thrust "family values" onto the nation's consciousness. Ministers, legislators, and laypeople came together to fight abortion, gay rights, and major feminist objectives. They supported private Christian schools, home schooling, and a strong military. Family values leaders like Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, and James Dobson became increasingly supportive of the Republican Party, which accommodated the language of family values in its platforms and campaigns. The family values agenda created a bond between evangelicalism and political conservatism. Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right chronicles how the family values agenda became so powerful in American political life and why it appealed to conservative evangelical Christians. Conservative evangelicals saw traditional gender norms as crucial in cultivating morality. They thought these gender norms would reaffirm the importance of clear lines of authority that the social revolutions of the 1960s had undermined. In the 1970s and 1980s, then, evangelicals founded Christian academies and developed homeschooling curricula that put conservative ideas about gender and authority front and center. Campaigns against abortion and feminism coalesced around a belief that God created women as wives and mothers—a belief that conservative evangelicals thought feminists and pro-choice advocates threatened. Likewise, Christian right leaders championed a particular vision of masculinity in their campaigns against gay rights and nuclear disarmament. Movements like the Promise Keepers called men to take responsibility for leading their families. Christian right political campaigns and pro-family organizations drew on conservative evangelical beliefs about men, women, children, and authority. These beliefs—known collectively as family values—became the most important religious agenda in late twentieth-century American politics.

The family is hotly contested ideological terrain. Some defend the traditional two-parent heterosexual family while others welcome its demise. Opinions vary about how much control parents should have over their children's upbringing. Family Values provides a major new theoretical account of the morality and politics of the family, telling us why the family is valuable, who has the right to parent, and what rights parents should—and should not—have over their children. Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift argue that parent-child relationships produce the "familial relationship goods" that people need to flourish. Children's healthy development depends on intimate relationships with authoritative adults, while the distinctive joys and challenges of parenting are part of a fulfilling life for adults. Yet the relationships that make these goods possible have little to do with biology, and do not require the extensive rights that parents currently enjoy. Challenging some of our most commonly held beliefs about the family, Brighouse and Swift explain why a child's interest in autonomy severely limits parents' right to shape their children's values, and why parents have no fundamental right to confer wealth or advantage on their children. Family Values reaffirms the vital importance of the family as a social institution while challenging its role in the reproduction of social inequality and carefully balancing the interests of parents and children.

This book which has been created in the framework of the EU-funded COST Action INTERFASOL brings together researchers from 22 INTERFASOL countries, who frame intergenerational family solidarity in the specific historical, cultural, social and economic context of their own country. Integrating different perspectives from social and political sciences, economics, communication, health and psychology, the book offers country-specific knowledge and new insights into family relations, family values and family policies across Europe. Praise for Families and Family Values in Society and Culture: "This comprehensive study of families in Europe reveals the strength and variation in family solidarity and values. By drawing together detailed descriptions of continuity and change, Families and Family Values in Society and Culture provides a fascinating account of the social and cultural contexts that shape European family life. The case studies of families in different European countries compare demographic and welfare regimes to consider the challenges facing generations in Europe and responses to these. The book is an invaluable resource for researchers studying family life and inter-generational solidarity." Clare Holdsworth Professor of Social Geography Keele University "This book is based on the testimony of experts, each of them proposing analyses which are specific to their own society. It provides an opportunity for the reader to take a new look at the evolution of intergenerational solidarity in 22 countries, whose wealth, welfare systems, and demographic situations, as well as recent events (wars, migratory movements, …) offer specific challenges. It adopts the perspective of the insider to shed light not only on culture and values in each country, but also on conflicts between tradition and modernity, and between subcultures in the same society. The book thus allows better understanding of changes in intergenerational and gender relations, and the variety of solutions implemented or suggested to promote more satisfactory expressions of intergenerational solidarity for the next decade. Families and Family Values in Society and Culture provides an invaluable contribution for cross-cultural and social sciences researchers interested in understanding how different forms of solidarity arise from family and social dynamics." Anne Marie Fontaine Professor of Psychology University of Porto

This rerelease of the popular original edition continues to speak to parents in a society where "family values" no longer seem to exist. If anything, today's community standards threaten the family. Airwaves and movie theaters are drenched with obscenities; perversion is glorified; divorce is cheap and easy; "safe sex" is promoted instead of abstinence; parental authority is undermined; sex roles are confused. For children, such cultural chaos is crippling. But in Real Family Values, parents will learn how to sort through today's moral confusion, remove it from their homes, and change the world by zeroing in on the part they love most: their families.

New Family Values provides a critical analysis of scholars and authors who argue that law and policy should be used to foster one model of family--the intact two-parent (heterosexual) family. The author argues that this position does not adequately address the problem in purports to solve -family dissolution--and unnecessarily constrains personal liberty. Civic stability and individual well-being require healthy families, but do not necessitate uniformity in family form.

A psychiatrist and former medical director helps parents rebuild their relationships with their children through four essential areas--trust, shared beliefs, family history and forgiveness--and shows how to overcome generational wounds and create safety and stability.

During the 1980s, U.S. television experienced a reinvigoration of the family sitcom genre. In TV Family Values, Alice Leppert focuses on the impact the decade's television shows had on middle class family structure. These sitcoms sought to appeal to upwardly mobile “career women” and were often structured around non-nuclear families and the reorganization of housework. Drawing on Foucauldian and feminist theories, Leppert examines the nature of sitcoms such as Full House, Family Ties, Growing Pains, The Cosby Show, and Who's the Boss? against the backdrop of a time period generally remembered as socially conservative and obsessed with traditional family values.

In celebration of IESE's 50 years of bridging the gap between theory and practice, this essential compilation brings together today's top researchers to tackle the real-life issues that family business owners face on a daily basis, shedding new light on the values that shape these special types of companies.

Tie into one of the biggest movies of the holiday season, Addams Family 2 (starring Raul Julie, Angelica Huston, and Christopher Lloyd), with this sensational book for young readers.