Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality

by Linda M. Blum

Overview

Winner, 2016 Outstanding Publication in the Sociology of Disability, American Sociological Association, Section Disability and Society

Examines the experiences of mothers coping with their children’s “invisible disabilities” in the face of daunting social, economic, and political realities

Recent years have seen an explosion in the number of children diagnosed with “invisible disabilities” such as ADHD, mood and conduct disorders, and high-functioning autism spectrum disorders. Whether they are viewed as biological problems in brain wiring or as results of the increasing medicalization of childhood, the burden of dealing with the day-to-day trials and complex medical and educational decisions falls almost entirely on mothers. Yet few ask how these mothers make sense of their children’s troubles, and to what extent they feel responsibility or blame. Raising Generation Rx offers a groundbreaking study that situates mothers’ experiences within an age of neuroscientific breakthrough, a high-stakes knowledge-based economy, cutbacks in public services and decent jobs, and increased global competition and racialized class and gender inequality.

Through in-depth interviews, observations of parents’ meetings, and analyses of popular advice, Linda Blum examines the experiences of diverse mothers coping with the challenges of their children’s “invisible disabilities” in the face of daunting social, economic, and political realities. She reveals how mothers in widely varied households learn to advocate for their children in the dense bureaucracies of the educational and medical systems; wrestle with anguishing decisions about the use of psychoactive medications; and live with the inescapable blame and stigma in their communities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479891870
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	03/13/2015
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Linda M. Blum is Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University. She is the author of Between Feminism and Labor: The Significance of the Comparable Worth Movement, At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States, and Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality.

Table of Contents

Contents
List of Tables vi
Acknowledgments vii
1. Mother-Child
Troubles, Past and Present 1
2. “Welcome to Your Child’s Brain”: Mothers Managing Dense 35
Bureaucracies, Medications, and Stigma
3. “The Multimillion-Dollar
Child”: Raising Kids with Invisible 90
Disabilities in the Context of Privilege
4. “I Think I Have to Advocate Five Thousand Times Harder!”: 137
Single Mothers in the Age of Neuroscience
5. En-gendering
the Medicalized Child 176
6. “A Strange Coincidence”: Race-ing
Disordered Children 210
7. Mothers, Children, and Families in a Precarious Time 237
Notes 257
References 285
Index 303
About the Author 311

Editorial Reviews

[…] [T]his is a fascinating book, a must have. Her book is grounded in sociological feminist theories of motherhood. It also discusses different experiences of mothers depending on their marital status, social class, and race. This book will certainly be of interest not only to academics, policymakers and practitioners but to parents as well.” -Sociology of Health & Illness

“It is personal, written accessibly, and provides a substantive grounding in the political and health context it critiques. Placing the experiences of mothers and their children at the center of the issue around medicalization and disability shifts the debate and places lay experience at the core.”-Gender & Society

"An insightful portrayal on the struggles of mothers under various strains of inequality and discrimination."-Journal of Youth and Adolescence

From the Publisher

"[] [T]his is a fascinating book, a must have. Her book is grounded in sociological feminist theories of motherhood. It also discusses different experiences of mothers depending on their marital status, social class, and race. This book will certainly be of interest not only to academics, policymakers and practitioners but to parents as well."

Sociology of Health & Illness

"While we read regularly about the Ritalin phenomenon and ADD kids, Linda Blum helps us to understand all of this from the perspective of mothers raising ADD-diagnosed children. Blum brings several unique lenses to this field of research: her critical medical sociology framework, attention to race, class and gender, and an in-depth interview approach, which gets at the complex ambivalences mothers (particularly those raising children of color) hold in relation to medicating and diagnosing their kids, and negotiating our contemporary risk culture. The result is the complex, multi-dimensional analysis that we need to balance out an increasingly hegemonic neuroscience perspective."

Meika Loe

"It is personal, written accessibly, and provides a substantive grounding in the political and health context it critiques. Placing the experiences of mothers and their children at the center of the issue around medicalization and disability shifts the debate and places lay experience at the core."

Gender & Society

"In this detailed and insightful book, Linda Blum carefully and thoughtfully lifts the lid on the lives of 48 women who identify as mothers of children with & invisible disabilities."

Disability and Society

"An insightful portrayal on the struggles of mothers under various strains of inequality and discrimination."

Journal of Youth and Adolescence

"Raising children is hard. Raising children with ADHD, Aspergers or autism is harder. Blending empathy and keen sociological analysis, Linda Blum shows how these mothers experiences vary by their socioeconomic status, marital status, race, and their childs gender, albeit in complex and often ironic ways. Highly recommended!"

Abigail Saguy

"Some 22 percent of American children today have some form of disability. In this highly important book, Linda Blum plunges us into the world of their worried mothers, deciphering labels and pills, fending off stigma, tirelessly advocating for their children. Married or alone, affluent or poor, such mothers often feel blamed and too rarely in the presence of real help. A carefully researched and deeply sensitive portrait of mothers on the Rx frontier."

Arlie Hochschild

"Mother and feminist sociologist Blum takes a scholarly look at how 'mother blame' and financial difficulties add to the challenge of raising children with conditions such as ADHD, Asperger's, and autism...Parents of children with disabilities that aren't immediately obvious can benefit from reading about others in their shoes and from considering Blum's take on this important public-health issue."

Booklist

"Mother and feminist sociologist Blum takes a scholarly look at how 'mother blame' and financial difficulties add to the challenge of raising children with conditions such as ADHD, Asperger's, and autism...Parents of children with disabilities that aren't immediately obvious can benefit from reading about others in their shoes and from considering Blum's take on this important public-health issue."

Booklist

2015-01-03
Blum (Sociology/Northeastern Univ.; At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States, 1999 etc.) addresses how demands on women have escalated and increasing numbers of maladjusted children are diagnosed with mental disabilities.Though gender roles are changing, mothers, writes the author, are still assigned "primary responsibility for child-care and the major share of blame when things go wrong." This often places mothers in the position of navigating between educational and medical authorities as they seek help for their children. Overcrowded, underfunded schools have little tolerance for disruptive behavior, and insurers are unwilling to approve payments for counseling when medications are available at lower cost. Diagnoses of brain malfunction are frequently made after the fact. If taking a prescription drug such as Ritalin improves a child's behavior, the thinking goes, then he has ADD; if not, perhaps he is bipolar, and new prescriptions become available. The author interviewed a few dozen mothers who were faced with trying to get help for their disturbed children while navigating medical and educational bureaucracies. The social and economic backgrounds of the author's interviewees range from upper-class stay-at-home moms to lower-class single mothers who serve as the sole support for their families and struggle to make ends meet. Despite their differences, their worries about overmedicating their children or seeing them fail in school are similar. Blum provides a wider social context, placing blame on "the neoliberal ideology…[that] values individual over public responsibility." The growing number of children who are "medicalized" is a reflection "of anxieties about an uncertain world in which boundaries of privilege within and outside the United States are being redrawn," raising the bar for success to include only the children with the highest levels of emotional and intellectual functioning.A valuable contribution to the national dialogue on health care and education, told through the voices of the mothers whose children's futures should be of concern to all of us.

Kirkus Reviews