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Briohny Doyle Books

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“Our paranoia about parenting is a symptom of a society that feels less and less certain about what matters in life, and why. -- Charlotte Faircloth, founding member of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent”

FamilyParentingAdulthood
Book:Adult Fantasy: Searching for True Maturity in an Age of Mortgages, Marriages, and Other Adult Milestones
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“Children are objectively important, and require care, attntion, stimulation, education. In lives that lack centres, it makes sense that these concrete tasks could fill the void: if we cannot name the moral terrain of our lives, we can make parenting our crucial moral task. And if this results in giving too much space to our children, it is only because we do not know what that space might otherwise contain.”

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Book:Adult Fantasy: Searching for True Maturity in an Age of Mortgages, Marriages, and Other Adult Milestones
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“After a century of entrenched individualism across much of the globe, we don't want to feel responsible for one another, but we are. If people are unsafe, homeless, sick, and abandones, we are responsible, even though the economic system we have set up shirks this responsibility. There is a name for a time without responsibility - it's called childhood. We aren't children, but we have created a childish politics, prone to loud tantrums where everything gets smashed. Perhaps that's why we continue to value the job and the kids and the marriage and the mortgage above all else - even when we can see, clear as a supermoon, how fragile these things are. Because we know that right now, outside these spaces, there is often no safety net, no space of home, no responsibility taken for what happens to us.”

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Book:Adult Fantasy: Searching for True Maturity in an Age of Mortgages, Marriages, and Other Adult Milestones
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“Educational reform over the last century - including, throughout Western democracies, standardised testing, moves to national curriculums, and competitive tertiary entry scores, sems to work on behalf of employers and parent-investors first, allowing them to efficiently read a young person's future without having to go to the trouble of listening to her. Education, from kindergarten coaching to big-ticket degrees, increasingly relies on the professionalisation of childhood and youth.”

EducationEducational Reform
Book:Adult Fantasy: Searching for True Maturity in an Age of Mortgages, Marriages, and Other Adult Milestones
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“In 2011, when then prime minister Julia Gillard based her opposition to the legal recognition of gay marriage in Australia on her strident belief in the traditional definition of marriage, we could all be forgiven for not knowing exactly which tradition she meant. Was it the tradition of marriage as a contract made between parents to connect kinship groups and reinforce economic and political power? Was it the tradition of marriage as a means to extend family influence into different geographical territories? Was it marriage as a tool for class consolidation or mobility? Was it marriage as a vehicle for women to escape their status as the property of their fathers to become instead the proprty of their husbands? Or was she referring to the tradition of marriage as cemented relatively recently in Australian legalese, to define marriage by what it is not? That is, it is not something that happens bteween a brother and a sister (though it can happen between cousins, or uncle and niece), nor a decision arrived at by force (though what constitutes 'force' is not defined), and it is definitely not the result of a same-sex couple eloping to a more liberal state for a party and a bogus piece of paper. Nevertheless, w all know that every marriage is different, and none can wholly be summed up be a sntence-long definition.”

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Book:Adult Fantasy: Searching for True Maturity in an Age of Mortgages, Marriages, and Other Adult Milestones
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