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Showing posts from February 2, 2014

another sunday, another bit of mystification

“ Senior quotes thesociologist Viviana A. Zelizer, who describes today’s children as “economicallyworthless but emotionally priceless.” Senior explains: “Every debate we havehad about the role of parents — whether they should be laissez-faire or interventionist‘Tiger Moms,’ attachment-oriented or partial to the rigors of tough love — canbe traced back to the paring down of mothers’ and fathers’ traditional roles.”   I had to read andrew soloman’s review of senior’s book on parenting in the NYT – somehow, we are talking about one of life’s irresistable topics for a certain class of punter. However, this quote from Zelizer, whose book on household money I liked quite a bit, is a big disappointment – a truism that somehow misses being truthful, even though a sentiment like it is repeated endlessly in the mags and thumbsuckers, as though here, here we had drilled down to the materialist nexus of things. One would think that a sociologist, especially, would not think in terms of a bourge