Abstract
Raising Generation Rx is a thoroughly researched and well-presented empirical text, examining how mothers manage their children’s care, conceptualize and understand their children’s invisible disabilities, and negotiate the welfare system. It places care work and caring for children with disabilities at the fore and explores the challenges mothers and their children face through in-depth, qualitative research. This timely text provides valuable empirical insight into the negotiation of the healthcare and education system. It incorporates a thorough discussion of the neoliberal state, education and healthcare reforms, alongside gender transformation and race relations in the United States.
The author sets out a contextual basis within the “new economy,” a postindustrial and gender-transformed labor market. In this context, individuals are clearly framed as “winners” or “losers,” with ever-increasing personal responsibility alongside decreasing levels of state support. Set within this is the “age of neuroscience” with an emphasis on biomedical diagnoses, interventions, and framing of illnesses, well-being, and managing the brain, all articulated through neuroscientific language.
In this, mothers find their struggle to attain “good enough” parenting status dependent on socioeconomic status and race, and the consequences for managing their children’s disabilities depend highly upon how these characteristics are perceived. This is emphasized through respondents’ narratives, social production of knowledge, and engagement with medical knowledge in contrast to the biomedical gaze. Blum makes a clear argument that we risk masking rising inequality and forgetting our collective responsibility in providing adequate support for all.
Blum employs an intersectional perspective that is emphasized throughout to investigate the overlapping nature of classed, racialized, and gendered oppression. By situating this discussion within contexts such as the production of medical knowledge, education, and the dynamics of individual schools, the reader gains insight into how intersectionality is a crucial epistemological tool when discussing health, well-being, power, and position in society.
Methodologically, this study is grounded in the views and experiences of mothers. Blum argues that since parenting is highly gendered, a focus on mothers provides key insights. The sample consist of in-depth, repeat interviews with 48 mothers of children who had been diagnosed with, or were in the process of getting a formal diagnosis of, ADD, ADHD, or autism. By including insights from across the socioeconomic spectrum, ethnic groups, and family types, the diverse sample demonstrated the value of intersectionality as a conceptual framing, and emphasizes the robust nature of the findings.
The author employs an explicitly feminist sociological perspective. She links the inherent connectedness of care work and gendered dynamics in contemporary society. She advocates for treating women as “active, thoughtful subjects” (p. 243), emphasizing the reflexive power and knowledge production of mothers. In doing so, she builds on a historical genealogy of motherhood and mothering in the United States. The author also fits this into a classed, cultural, and political economy narrative in a neoliberal context.
Blum’s interrogation of the medicalization of childhood is well rounded and objective, engaging with sociological accounts of medicalization as cultural intervention, the language of neuroscience, and biomedical perspectives to enhance our understanding of the way children’s “disordered” behavior is viewed, understood, and managed. Throughout the empirical discussion, there is an emphasis on the multicausal explanations mothers themselves give. At times, children in the study are portrayed as agency-less: unpredictable entities in need of management by their parents. Rather than reporting mothers’ opinions on this, an explicit critique or reflexive engagement may have yielded insight into how the children themselves conceptualize and manage their conditions.
Raising Generation Rx is a very useful resource for those studying or researching gender, intersectionality, or the neoliberal transformations of the welfare state and is worth serious consideration. It will also appeal to those who have an interest in the political economy of care, parenting practices, the postindustrial context of the United States, social inequality, and disability. The text covers many themes, the intersecting context of neuroscience, neoliberalism, highly gendered parenting, disability, and the new economy as well as risk society. The feminist methodology employed and its explicit discussion of the social context of health contributes to a pool of knowledge that is challenging dominant discourses of power, health, and well-being. 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.