With all the complex intersection of intimacy and economic activity going on in households, one might think that lawyers would delight in bringing household disputes to court. In fact, American law sets important barriers between household struggles and litigation. Un­like commercial dealings, the law generally presumes that economic transactions among cohabiting family members are “gratuitous,” […]

What happens when ongoing household relations break down? How do parents, children, siblings, and other household members realign their economic transactions? Two categories of disruption differ significantly in their impact on household relations: one breaks an existing connection between the household and the rest of the world, the other intervenes directly in household relations. In […]

Children are also involved in household caring work. In chapter 4, we saw the obstacles to recognizing personal care, including child care, as real work. Acknowledging children’s own care work, how­ever, turns out to be even more challenging than recognizing adults’ efforts. Children, after all, are not supposed to be caregivers, but recipients of care. […]

Consider the impact of children’s linguistic skills for their immi­grant parents. Even when young, children educated and brought up in the receiving country often have far greater skills in the new country’s language than their parents (see Portes and Hao 2002). In one crucial way, this reverses the usual skill distribution within the household. Studying […]

More generally, what part do children play in household produc­tion? The general idea that households have lost their economic functions, except for consumption displays, implies another mis­conception: that children no longer contribute to the household economy. Any household work children do perform, moreover, is expected to build the child’s character or skills, but not seriously […]

If households have gained notoriety as sites of consumption—waste­ful or otherwise—Americans commonly think of household produc­tion as a thing of the past. Perhaps Grandma and Grandpa ran a farm or a store, goes the thought, but now everyone travels elsewhere to produce. That idea rests on a mistaken equation of production with paid employment and/or […]

If a household with children moves into a new house, buys a differ­ent kind of car, builds a swimming pool, purchases racing bicycles, buys a used air conditioner, or acquires the latest computer system, the children often play significant parts in the consumption decision and almost always alter their own daily activities and relations as […]

American critics of conspicuous and wasteful consumption rarely single out housing. Most frequently they fix on consumer durables such as automobiles, electronic devices, household appliances, and furniture. Although we may deplore excesses in all those regards, the acquisition and use of such items neatly illustrates how consumption simultaneously activates household social relations, shapes those re­lations, […]

Students of contemporary America have often thought that house­holds are nothing but sites of consumption, and have thought of consumption primarily as an expression of households’ social posi­tion. But, alerted by the profusion of economic activity involved in the transfer and control of household assets, we can see immediately that neither of these assumptions will […]

In chapter 4, we saw Vermont family day-care providers dealing with parents of the children they supervised (Nelson 1990). But the in­come they generated this way became crucial assets for their own household survival. For these providers, earnings from child care averaged more than a third of their total household income. Ac­cording to Margaret Nelson, […]