Semi-Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award

"Putting Children First is must reading for anyone making decisions that affect low-income mothers as they struggle to balance work and family responsibilities-in fact, for anyone who cares about the future of children. Ajay Chaudry makes crystal clear the pitfalls of making social policy from an altitude of 50,000 feet. Knowing the facts on the ground is the first step to a sensible child-care system. We have a long way to go, but this book is a great step in the right direction."
-PETER B. EDELMAN, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center

"Ajay Chaudry's Putting Children First is the most insightful and poignant study of the child-care problems of poor single mothers in urban areas that I have read. This book should be required reading not only for students of urban poverty, but also for national policy makers of welfare reform who have yet to address many of the unique challenges of single motherhood in low-income urban neighborhoods."
-WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University

"An honest, poignant ethnography, Putting Children First provides an extraordinary window into the child care worries of poorly paid working mothers who find that good care for their children is unaffordable and scarce. Ajay Chaudry reminds us what it costs to drop the best interests of children from our national policy agenda. Sharp, focused, and wise."
-CAROL STACK, Professor of Social and Cultural Studies in Education, University of California, Berkeley

"Ajay Chaudry skillfully takes us into the reality of the child care struggles of low-income working parents, and the picture is both disturbing and illuminating. The findings will almost certainly alter the reader's thinking about the dilemmas mothers and policy makers face and the strategies for doing better. If one cares about welfare reform, or low-income workers, or most importantly the future of our children, this book is important reading."
-DAVID T. ELLWOOD, Dean and Scott M. Black Professor of Political Economy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

In the five years following the passage of federal welfare reform law, the labor force participation of low-income, single mothers with young children climbed by more than 25 percent. With significantly more hours spent outside the home, single working mothers face a serious childcare crunch—how can they provide quality care for their children? In Putting Children First, Ajay Chaudry follows forty-two low-income families in New York City over three years to illuminate the plight of these mothers and the ways in which they respond to the difficult challenge of providing for their children’s material and developmental needs with limited resources.

Using the words of the women themselves, Chaudry tells a startling story. Scarce subsidies, complicated bureaucracies, inflexible work schedules, and limited choices force families to piece together care arrangements that are often unstable, unreliable, inconvenient, and of limited quality. Because their wages are so low, these women are forced to rely on inexpensive caregivers who are often under-qualified to serve the developmental needs of their children. Even when these mothers find good, affordable care, it rarely lasts long because their volatile employment situations throw their needs into constant flux. The average woman in Chaudry’s sample had to find five different primary caregivers in her child’s first four years, while over a quarter of them needed seven or more in that time.

This book lets single, low-income mothers describe the childcare arrangements they desire and the ways that options available to them fail to meet even their most basic needs. As Chaudry tracks these women through erratic childcare spells, he reveals the strategies they employ, the tremendous costs they incur and the anxiety they face when trying to ensure that their children are given proper care.

Honest, powerful, and alarming, Putting Children First gives a fresh perspective on work and family for the disadvantaged. It infuses a human voice into the ongoing debate about the effectiveness of welfare reform, showing the flaws of a social policy based solely on personal responsibility without concurrent societal responsibility, and suggesting a better path for the future.

AJAY CHAUDRY is a writer on social policy issues and a faculty and senior research fellow in urban policy and management at New School University.

Often described as an emergency, homelessness in America is becoming a chronic condition that reflects an overall decline in the nation's standard of living and the general state of the economy. This is the disturbing conclusion drawn by Martha Burt in Over the Edge, a timely book that takes a clear-eyed look at the astonishing surge in the homeless population during the 1980s.

Assembling and analyzing data from 147 U.S. cities, Burt documents the increase in homelessness and proposes a comprehensive explanation of its causes, incorporating economic, personal, and policy determinants. Her unique research answers many provocative questions: Why did homelessness continue to spiral even after economic conditions improved in 1983? Why is it significantly greater in cities with both high poverty rates and high per capita income? What can be done about the problem?

Burt points to the significant catalysts of homelessness—the decline of manufacturing jobs in the inner city, the increased cost of living, the tight rental housing market, diminished household income, and reductions in public benefit programs—all of which exert pressures on the more vulnerable of the extremely poor. She looks at the special problems facing the homeless, including the growing number of mentally ill and chemically dependent individuals, and explains why certain groups—minorities and low-skilled men, single men and women, and families headed by women—are at greatest risk of becoming homeless. Burt's analysis reveals that homelessness arises from no single factor, but is instead perpetuated by pivotal interactions between external social and economic conditions and personal vulnerabilities.

From an understanding of these interactions, Over the Edge builds lucid, realistic recommendations for policymakers struggling to alleviate a situation of grave consequence for our entire society.

MARTHA R. BURT is director of the Social Services Research Program at the Urban Institute.

Just as famines and plagues can provide opportunities for medical research, the unhappy course of United States relations with Vietnam is a prime source of evidence for students of American political institutions. How Presidents Test Reality draws on the record of American decision making about Vietnam to explore the capacity of top government executives and their advisers to engage in effective reality testing.

Authors Burke and Greenstein compare the Vietnam decisions of two presidents whose leadership styles and advisory systems diverged as sharply as any in the modern presidency. Faced with a common challenge—an incipient Communist take-over of Vietnam—presidents Eisenhower and Johnson engaged in intense debates with their aides and associates, some of whom favored intervention and some of whom opposed it. In the Dien Bien Phu Crisis of 1954, Eisenhower decided not to enter the conflict; in 1965, when it became evident that the regime in South Vietnam could not hold out much longer, Johnson intervened.

How Presidents Test Reality uses declassified records and interviews with participants to assess the adequacy of each president’s use of advice and information. This important book advances our historical understanding of the American involvement in Vietnam and illuminates the preconditions of effective presidential leadership in the modern world.

"An exceptionally thoughtful exercise in what ‘contemporary history’ ought to be. Illuminates the past in a way that suggests how we might deal with the present and the future." —John Lewis Gaddis

"Burke and Greenstein have written what amounts to an owner's manual for operating the National Security Council....This is a book Reagan's people could have used and George Bush ought to read." —Bob Schieffer, The Washington Monthly

JOHN P. BURKE is associate professor of political science at the University of Vermont.

FRED I. GREENSTEIN is professor of politics at Princeton University and director of the Program in Leadership Studies at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

"This work addresses an area of great interest in recent social policy discussions about the underclass. These two volumes report new and innovative research, and should be of interest to people in child development, social psychology, sociology, and economics. An important work."
-LEE RAINWATER, Harvard University

"Neighborhood Poverty is a monumental work, reporting the results of a massive interdisciplinary effort to understand the role of neighborhood contexts on the development of children. These volumes combine some of the strongest empirical work to date with thoughtful conceptual and methodological critiques of neighborhood effects research, which move beyond merely looking for neighborhood effects to understanding the mechanisms through which these effects are manifested. The research effort chronicled here is a model of how social science research ought to be conducted on complex social issues."
-PAUL JARGOWSKY, University of Texas at Dallas

Perhaps the most alarming phenomenon in American cities has been the transformation of many neighborhoods into isolated ghettos where poverty is the norm and violent crime, drug use, out-of-wedlock births, and soaring school dropout rates are rampant. Public concern over these destitute areas has focused on their most vulnerable inhabitants—children and adolescents. How profoundly does neighborhood poverty endanger their well-being and development? Is the influence of neighborhood more powerful than that of the family? Neighborhood Poverty approaches these questions with an insightful and wide-ranging investigation into the effect of community poverty on children's physical health, cognitive and verbal abilities, educational attainment, and social adjustment.

This two-volume set offers the most current research and analysis from experts in the fields of child development, social psychology, sociology and economics. Drawing from national and city-based sources, Volume I reports the empirical evidence concerning the relationship between children and community. As the essays demonstrate, poverty entails a host of problems that affects the quality of educational, recreational, and child care services.Poor neighborhoods usually share other negative features—particularly racial segregation and a preponderance of single mother families—that may adversely affect children. Yet children are not equally susceptible to the pitfalls of deprived communities. Neighborhood has different effects depending on a child's age, race, and gender, while parenting techniques and a family's degree of community involvement also serve as mitigating factors.

Volume II incorporates empirical data on neighborhood poverty into discussions of policy and program development. The contributors point to promising community initiatives and suggest methods to strengthen neighborhood-based service programs for children. Several essays analyze the conceptual and methodological issues surrounding the measurement of neighborhood characteristics. These essays focus on the need to expand scientific insight into urban poverty by drawing on broader pools of ethnographic, epidemiological, and quantitative data. Volume II explores the possibilities for a richer and more well-rounded understanding of neighborhood and poverty issues.

To grasp the human cost of poverty, we must clearly understand how living in distressed neighborhoods impairs children's ability to function at every level. Neighborhood Poverty explores the multiple and complex paths between community, family, and childhood development. These two volumes provide and indispensable guide for social policy and demonstrate the power of interdisciplinary social science to probe complex social issues.

JEANNE BROOKS-GUNN is Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is also director of the Center for Children and Families and founder of the Adolescent Study Program at Teachers College.

GREG J. DUNCAN is professor of education and social policy and a faculty associate in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. He is also faculty affiliate of the Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research.

J. LAWRENCE ABER is director of the National Center for Children in Poverty at the Columbia School of Public Health, Columbia University.

CONTRIBUTORS:Daniel Aaronson, Prudence Brown, Linda M. Burton, Thomas D. Cook, Claudia J. Coulton, Nancy Darling, Serdar M. Degirmencioglu, Frank M. Furstenberg Jr., Martha A. Gephart, Mary Elizabeth Hughes, Robin L. Jarrett, Sheila B. Kamerman, Tedd Jay Kochman, Jill E. Korbin, Tama Leventhal, Paul A. McDermott, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, Townsand Price-Spratlen, Harold A. Richman, Robert J. Sampson,  Margaret Beale Spencer, Shobha C. Shagle, Laurence Steinberg.