Winner of the American Sociological Association section on Race, Gender, and Class Outstanding Scholarship Award

Finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems

With the wisdom of a Solomon, but with far more intellectual nuance, patience, and compassion, Jennifer Reich explores how agents of the state adjudicate the fate of parents whose children have been identified as needing protective services. With rare sympathy for all the unhappy actors in these traumatic conflicts–children, mothers, fathers, relatives, social workers, lawyers, and family judges–Reich moves beyond the easy bromides about saving children or saving families. She shows how fixed notions of family impede efforts to help families in a fix. Fixing Families is the book Solomon would have written if he were a gifted sociologist.

-Judith Stacey, Professor of Sociology, New York University Author, In the Name of The Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age