No Exit: What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents

By Anne L. Alstott

Book Overview

In order to create a more secure world for children and their parents, Anne Alstott argues, we must fundamentally change the way we think about parents' obligations to children--and about society's obligations to parents. Drawing on the same innovative thinking that propelled her and Bruce Ackerman's influential work The Stakeholder Society, Alstott proposes a solution both pragmatic and controversial. She outlines two unsentimental proposals intended to improve parents' economic options while respecting every individual's own choices about how best to combine paid work and child-rearing. Rejecting both state paternalism and easy libertarianism, Alstott's proposals are bold and unapologetic in their implications.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195306414
• ISBN13: 9780195306415
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Worth reading

Anne Alstott is an clear, thoughtful writer and this book is fascinating.She is unusually skillful at making incisive arguments of two different kinds: - moral arguments, in this case arguments about what society owes parents (given what parents do for society), and - practical policy arguments about how her new policy initiatives should be shaped to help parents the most without being overly paternalistic.This book links those two kinds of arguments, and the result is a convincing moral case for some major policy changes. They may not be quite the ones you expect. Alstott is hard to pigeonhole as either a traditional feminist or a traditional economic liberal. Her proposals have their own logic. I think they're worth reading whatever your political/philosophical views.