This anniversary edition of the guide to baby and child care includes new material on obesity and nutrition, nontraditional family structures, environmental health, and such common disorders as ADHD and autism.

At the height of the Vietnam War, thousands of Americans wrote moving letters to Dr. Benjamin Spock, America’s pediatrician and a high-profile opponent of the war. Personal and heartfelt, thoughtful and volatile, these missives from Middle America provide an intriguing glimpse into the conflicts that took place over the dinner table as people wrestled with this divisive war and with their consciences. Providing one of the first clear views of the home front during the war, Dear Dr. Spock collects the best of these letters and offers a window into the minds of ordinary Americans. They wrote to Spock because he was familiar, trustworthy, and controversial. His book Baby and Child Care was on the shelves of most homes, second only to the Bible in the number of copies sold. Starting in the 1960s, his activism in the antinuclear and antiwar movements drew mixed reactions from Americans—some puzzled, some supportive, some angry, and some desperate. Most of the letters come from what Richard Nixon called the “silent majority”—white, middleclass, law-abiding citizens who the president thought supported the war to contain Communism. In fact, the letters reveal a complexity of reasoning and feeling that moves far beyond the opinion polls at the time. One mother of young children struggles to imagine how Vietnamese women could endure after their village was napalmed, while another chastises Spock for the “dark shadow” he had cast on the country and pledges to instill love of country in her sons. What emerges is a portrait of articulate Americans struggling mightily to understand government policies in Vietnam and how those policies did or did not reflect their own sense of themselves and their country.

"Oracle carefully explores the dangers and benefits of diet and exercise books, sex manuals, and self-actualization schemes. It is a timely and fascinating work, and will be of great interest to health-care providers and thoughtful consumers." --Joseph D. Matarazzo,American Psychological Association

Ideologies in Action: Morphological Adaptation and Political Ideas explores how political ideas move across geographical, social and chronological boundaries. Focusing on North American and European case studies ranging from populist tax revolts through parenting advice manuals to online learning environments, the contributors propose new methods for understanding how political entrepreneurs, intellectuals and ordinary citizens deploy and redefine ideologies. All of these groups are consumers of ideology, drawing on pre-existing, transnational ideological concepts and narratives in order to make sense of the world. They are also all producers of ideology, adapting and reconfiguring ideological material to support their own political aims, desires and policy objectives. In doing so, they combine common conceptual elements – interpretations of freedom, order, national identity, democracy, community or equality – with sentiments and imaginations deeply embedded in cultural and social practice. To render these ideological practices intelligible, the contributors to this volume blend conceptual morphology, which emphasizes how meaning emerges in and through connections between political ideas, with close readings of the vernacular and experiential dimensions of ideologies in action. This book offers new insights into how ideologies in varied social and political settings can be decoded, and challenges hierarchical distinctions between ideological ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Political Ideologies.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, millions of anxious parents have turned to child-rearing manuals for reassurance. Instead, however, they have often found yet more cause for worry. In this rich social history, Ann Hulbert analyzes one hundred years of shifting trends in advice and discovers an ongoing battle between two main approaches: a “child-centered” focus on warmly encouraging development versus a sterner “parent-centered” emphasis on instilling discipline. She examines how pediatrics, psychology, and neuroscience have fueled the debates but failed to offer definitive answers. And she delves into the highly relevant and often turbulent personal lives of the popular advice-givers, from L. Emmett Holt and Arnold Gesell to Bruno Bettelheim and Benjamin Spock to the prominent (and ever conflicting) experts of today.

"Hattery′s book is an important contribution to this literature. The book is engaging and is well written. I would recommend this book and encourage Hattery to continue examination of this construct." - Psychology of Women Quarterly Women, Work, and Family: Balancing and Weaving is a fascinating examination of the extraordinary juggling skills of working mothers who balance their obligations to both work and family. Angela Hattery goes beyond a mere description of women′s conflicts of interest and seeks to understand the decision-making process through which they accomplish this balancing. Through intensive interviews with 30 married women, all with children under 2 years of age, Hattery uncovers a remarkable range of ways in which these women weave together the complex strands of their lives. The data in the volume are examined from a number of theoretical standpoints, including structural theory, motherhood theory, and feminist theory. A key variable that runs through the data is economic need, which has an obvious effect on work patterns. Women, Work, and Family will make a major contribution to family studies and will illuminate the difficult choices that women make within the family/work context.

This examination of the extraordinary juggling skills of working women who balance obligations to work & family goes beyond description of possible conflicts of interest to seek an understanding of the decision-making process through which they accomplish this balancing.

The first edition helped bring the family approach to health care into the medical mainstream. This new edition, like the first, provides health care professionals with a practical guide to working with and treating both the individual patient and the family. Tackling challenging and emerging issues, such as AIDS and the family, race and gender, child abuse and domestic violence in addition to pregnancy, child behavior and chronic illness, this volume is sure to be an indispensable guide for primary care providers.

In assessing the current state of feminism and gender studies, whether on a theoretical or a practical level, it has become increasingly challenging to avoid the conclusion that these fields are in a state of disarray. Indeed, feminist and gender studies discussions are beset with persistent splits and disagreements. This reader suggests that returning to, and placing centre-stage, the role of philosophy, especially critical realist philosophy of science, is invaluable for efforts that seek to overcome or mitigate the uncertainty and acrimony that have resulted from this situation. In particular, it claims that the dialectical logic that runs through critical realist philosophy is ideally suited to advancing feminist and gender studies discussions about broad ontological and epistemological questions and considerations, intersectionality, and methodology, methods, and empirical research. By bringing together four new and eight existing writings this reader provides both a focal point for renewed discussions about the potential and actual contributions of critical realist philosophy to feminism and gender studies and a timely contribution to these discussions.