Parenting Empires

In Parenting Empires, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas focuses on the parenting practices of Latin American urban elites to analyze how everyday experiences of whiteness, privilege, and inequality reinforce national and hemispheric idioms of anti-corruption and austerity. Ramos-Zayas shows that for upper-class residents in the affluent neighborhoods of Ipanema (Rio de Janeiro) and El Condado (San Juan), parenting is particularly effective in providing moral grounding for neoliberal projects that disadvantage the overwhelmingly poor and racialized people who care for and teach their children. Wealthy parents in Ipanema and El Condado cultivate a liberal cosmopolitanism by living in multicultural city neighborhoods rather than gated suburban communities. Yet as Ramos-Zayas reveals, their parenting strategies, which stress spirituality, empathy, and equality, allow them to preserve and reproduce their white privilege. Defining this moral economy as “parenting empires,” she sheds light on how child-rearing practices permit urban elites in the Global South to sustain and profit from entrenched social and racial hierarchies.

In this book, Hans-Jürgen Burchardt and Irene Lungo-Rodríguez lead a transdisciplinary team of experts to advance our understanding of wealth in Latin America. Combining conceptual discussions with empirical research, they analyze characteristics of wealth, and the implications for inequality. Three thematic sections provide a unique overarching structure to understand the economic, social, political, and cultural complexity of wealth. Questions examined include: What economic, institutional, and structural factors contribute to the excessive accumulation of wealth? What political dynamics promote the concentration of wealth and power? What type of social, political, and economic relations are generated in these contexts of extreme wealth concentration? What socio-cultural processes contribute to legitimizing and reproducing wealth? What are the local, regional, and national socio-ecological effects of these dynamics? Wealth, Development and Social Inequalities in Latin America provides thought-provoking reading for students and researchers alike who wish to look beyond the Global North for answers on the importance of studying wealth.

Effective parenting is about raising well-adjusted children who are assets to society; Maximized Parenting is a book which promotes effective parenting through equipping parents with the knowledge that fosters proper foundation for parenting. According to Partnership for 21st Century Skills [2006] and American Management Association's [AMA] 2010 Survey, many employers believe that higher education is failing in its role to adequately develop needed skills in students. Parents with the help of this book can bridge the knowledge gap between what higher education provides and what the employment industry requires. The book is for parents who consider parenting as one of their most important responsibilities in life. One of the greatest assets a child could have is dutiful parents from whom he/she learns the act of parenting. Parents without this privilege are large in number and to them parenting is a dark continent which they find difficult to navigate. This book is written to inform, inspire and impart knowledge about parenting in the 21st century. The book would enable parents interact with their children in a way that would motivate them to be outstanding persons in life. In this information age, you cannot limit your child to how you were brought up or what you know because he/she was born in another era. The gamut of issues covered in this book will equip you to bring up your child to be successful in life. Issues treated in this book will help you know healthy parenting methods that are best for your child The book contains a very broad mix of issues a parent would encounter at every stage of a child's life. It is written from the perspective that a parent's job is for life and as such parents need help to sustain their long term commitment to their children. Issues covered include character building, instilling moral values into children, basic life skills at every stage of life, sexuality education and handling children with special needs. While the information in this book is specifically for parents, the information would be useful to fathers' groups, men's groups, women's groups, grandparents, extended family members and childcare providers that have opportunities to relate to children. Research now and again has shown that a family is more important to a child's school success than how much money the family makes or how much education the parents have. No parent who has read this book should ever ask "How can I make my child a success in life." The social commentator Michael Novak wrote on the importance of family, "One unforgettable law has been learned through all the disasters and injustices of the last thousand years: if things go well with the family, life is worth living; when the family falters, life falls apart". The goal of Maximized Parenting is to fill the knowledge gap in you that will make you a better parent as well as an inspiration to other parents of the 21st century. Choose to be an intentional parent who will put in the needed time, energy and efforts to raise successful children. Know that expensive toys and vacations are a poor substitute for the valuable time you need to spend with your children. Refuse to outsource your parenting duties to care givers and boarding schools and you will be a stakeholder in the next generations through your children who will pass on your legacies. Remember, when a parent dies, one thing that cannot be buried with him/her is his/her impact on the lives of his/her children, those things become a living memorial in his/her children.

This edited volume advances the conceptual framework of the 'everyday urban' to unpack the ways in which processes of modernity in India shape young subjects and, in so doing, centers the analytical categories of childhood and youth. In rejecting simplistic binaries of agency, and teleological logics of development and modernity, the authors focus on the complex pathways of negotiation and conflict that mark the lives of young people across various historical and contemporary contexts in urban India. Chapters are organized across two key themes: Shaping Modern Subjects and Being Modern Subjects, while spanning multiple disciplines including anthropology, history, sociology, disability studies, and psychology. Together, the contributions aim to advance the field of childhood and youth studies in South Asia and beyond.

Children are Everywhere engages with how demographic anxieties and reproductive regimes emerge as forms of social inclusion and exclusion in a low fertility Western European context. This book explores everyday experiences of parenting and childlessness of ‘ethnic’ Germans in Berlin, who came of age around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and brings them into conversation with theories on parenting, waithood, non-biological intimacies, and masculinities. This is the first ethnographic work by a South Asian author on demographic anxieties and reproduction in Germany and reverses the anthropological gaze to study Europe as the ‘Other.’

"This book--a story of social reproduction and change--illustrates how the larger ideological struggles over who belongs in this country, who is valuable, and who is an American are worked out by young people through their everyday acts of striving in school and caring for friends and family. It uses the experiences of everyday high schoolers, some undocumented and some from families with mixed legal standing, to understand the roles that education and a broad definition of achievement play in shaping how young people, who are today the focus of xenophobic ire, come to understand their national identity and sense of belonging to the United States"--

This book is a study of class formation at the top of the social hierarchies during the turbulent and changing early twenty-first century. Contrary to perceptions that privileged individuals exist according to little more than market and economic logics, the book provides evidence that they are by no means absent from politics and civic engagement. Adopting a focus on reproduction, distinction, and politics, it delves into the complex relationship between cohesion and fragmentation that exists within the most privileged groups formed over the course of the contemporary neoliberal period. By knitting a dialogue between spatial analysis, multiple correspondence analysis, and in-depth interviews, the book provides insights into the intricate relations between institutions and political subjectivities, and the role of space and mothering in the political socialisation of Chile’s most privileged families. The result is a dense description of a social class fragmented by subtle ideological lines based upon economic inheritance, socialisation within homogeneous family environments, paths into the labour market, and social and political activities. This book will constitute a much-needed research resource for academics, students, and professionals in areas such as elite studies, social stratification, inequality, social reproduction, accumulation, political socialisation, and contemporary conservative/progressive views.