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Update your browser The family home is the place where the child is brought up. It is where he or she is first introduced to reality, beginning with the reality of familial relations themselves and their primacy with respect to the State and the Market. In this three-part series, we look at the current challenges to the home as a place of life, nourishment, education, play, work, even industry. We look at motherhood and work, technology in the home, and the growing suburban isolation of the home.
“Home and Neighborhood” is the last of a three-part series examining the pressures on the family in the contemporary world. With this issue, we move beyond the domestic sphere to include reflections on neighborhood, community, and the impact of the built environment on human relationships.
What is the impact of technology in the home, especially the new information technology, and the social media? Are these technologies rewiring our brains? Is technology really morally neutral? Is it just a tool we use, or can it be said to be using us for its own built-in purposes? What are the implications for home life, for family time, for reading, for the atmosphere in which we live?
This issue is the first of a three-part series on the theme of “Home and the Family.” Here we reflect on the meaning, challenges and joys of motherhood, examine the impact of day care on young children and take part in the recent debate on “work–life balance,” as sparked by Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s influential article on the same topic in The Atlantic.