Overview

Throughout the twentieth-century, the United States implemented social policies targeting the needs of dependent parents – parents who were no longer able to work but lacked sufficient financial resources to support themselves. These parent dependency policies either encouraged or required family members, particularly adult children, to provide support as an alternative to government benefits. Debates over how best to support aging parents centered on conceptualizations of dependency and the moral obligations family owed their parents. Measures of dependency often inhibited aging Americans' access to benefits they needed, focusing instead on ensuring that they were, in fact, dependent and that other family resources were not available. Susan Stein-Roggenbuck highlights this understudied aspect of the modern US welfare state, highlighting the limited support provided to aging parents and the hardship they and their adult children endured in the efforts to minimize public expenditures.

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9781009203289

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'With threats to Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid on the horizon, Susan Stein-Roggenbuck explains why we all should care about a heteronormative family policy that has deprived dependent elders of dignity and financially burdened those who care for them out of love or obligation. Caring for Mom and Dad shows the limits of both social assistance and tax policy for welfare justice when federalism reinforces inequality.' Eileen Boris, co-author of Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State 'In this extraordinarily insightful and carefully researched book, Susan Stein-Roggenbuck probes beneath the widespread acceptance of 'dependent' aged Americans to reveal deep disagreements about whom those Americans ought to depend on first: their family or the state. The conflicts and unstable resolutions that Stein-Roggenbuck documents have a compelling human dimension, but they also have much to teach us about the complex role of social welfare law and administration in American governance. In illuminating this important and understudied topic, Stein-Roggenbuck offers vital insights for both historians and for present-day policymakers.' Karen Tani, author of States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935–1972

Author Information

Susan Stein-Roggenbuck is an Associate Professor of American social policy in James Madison College at Michigan State University. She is the author of Negotiating Relief: The Development of Social Welfare Programs in Depression-Era Michigan, 1930–1940 (2020).

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