Taking the Parent Trip

Posted on March 11, 2026 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Anndee Hochman, author of Parent Trip: Unexpected Roads to Form a Family, writes about writing about families.

Every writer has their obsessions. Family is mine. I’ve been writing about family matters—kinship and friendship, conception and adoption, the people we’re born to and the ones we choose—for more than thirty years.

My first book, Everyday Acts & Small Subversions: Women Reinventing Family, Community and Home, chronicled the myriad ways women in the 1980s and early 1990s were creating family outside of conventional norms. In Anatomies: A Novella and Stories, many of my fictional protagonists were young adults hungry for kinship and connection.

And for nearly a decade, my weekly “Parent Trip” column in the Philadelphia Inquirer told the frank, wry, tender and occasionally harrowing stories of people who had just become parents.

I cast the net wide: stories of individuals and couples who formed families through adoption, conception, gestational surrogacy and family-blending. I interviewed multifaith and multiracial families, parents who were straight and queer, older and younger, single and partnered, having their first kid or their fifth. “Parent Trip” told stories of infertility, sperm and egg donation, grandparents raising grandkids, surprise pregnancies and long-sought international adoptions.

Each column included a photo of the parents and their children—images that, along with the text, became both mirrors and windows. In “Parent Trip,” some readers saw their experiences reflected, perhaps for the first time, in the pages of a major newspaper. For others, the columns offered intimate glimpses of lives utterly unlike their own.

I wanted to remind readers, every week: “See? A family can look like this. Or this. Or this.”

Over the decade that the column ran, and in the years since it ended, the political landscape has shifted seismically.

I began “Parent Trip” nine months before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, the decision that made marriage equality for same-sex couples the law of the United States. And I concluded it just over a year after that court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a decision that reversed a half-century of legalized abortion.

Today, elected officials are restricting access to gender-affirming care, and an aggressive push to deport undocumented immigrants has splintered families and hurt children nationwide.

At a time when the government is trying—through anti-trans legislation, “don’t say gay” bills and limits on what teachers can teach and students can read—to constrict the definition of family, this book does the opposite. It stretches our sense of possibility. It dismantles stereotypes. It rejoices in the particulars of human life. It reminds us that there is no single way to build or sustain a family.

To create Parent Trip, I read through more than 450 “Parent Trip” entries, revisiting a decade that included three presidents and a world-altering pandemic—along with my own daughter’s growth from an adolescent to a young adult—then selected 42 of them to include and wrote the personal essays that form the spine of this book.  

Together, those essays and stories celebrate a wild variety of families while underscoring some essential, common truths: The road toward parenthood is unpredictable. The effort requires a village. Your kids will change you. No one can forecast exactly how.

Filed under: american studies, cultural studies, gender studies, sexuality, sociology, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Announcing Temple University Press’ Spring/Summer 2026 Catalog

Posted on January 21, 2026 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, we present our exciting list of titles from our Spring/Summer 2026 Catalog

To read the full catalog online, please click here.

Declaration House, edited by Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Paul M. Farber, and Yolanda Wisher
Expanding our ideas and notions about who is counted among our American founders

Native Americans and Pennsylvania: Revised and Expanded Edition, by Daniel K. Richter
An up-to-date survey of regional Indigenous history from earliest times to the present

The Mighty WMMR: An Oral History of Philadelphia’s Rock Radio Revolution, by Erin Riley
An insider’s behind-the-scenes look at how WMMR grew to rule Philadelphia’s rock radio world in the 1970s and 1980s

Elected American: From Red China to Blue Maryland, by Lily Qi
An immigrant’s journey from Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution to the Maryland State House

Torn from the Root: A Memoir of a Black Transracial Adoptee, Rhonda M. Roorda
A powerful journey of identity and belonging

Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism, by Zalman Newfield
An affecting memoir about moving away from a tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community

Your Own Will Leave You: My Mother’s Dementia, by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee
An intense—and intensely moving—account of the impact of his mother’s dementia on the author’s life

Stories of Raising Boys: Masculinity, Disability, Gender Expansiveness, and Anxiety, by Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock
Exploring the complexity and cultural intersections of parenting and masculinity

Not Going Back: Public Opinion on Abortion in Post-Dobbs America, by Laurel Elder, Steven Greene, and Mary-Kate Lizotte
How American opinion on abortion has undergone a profound shift following the Dobbs decision

The Power We Need Right Now: Black Sororities and Black Radical Movements of the 1970s, by Aisha A. Upton Azzam
Examines diverging Black sorority responses to activism in the post-civil rights era

Searching for Democracy: Women, Domestic Work, and Social Reproduction in Latin America, by Leda M. Pérez
How fully enfranchising women in the lowest tiers of employment can help close the equality gap in Latin America

How Women Win Presidential Elections in Latin America, by Catherine Reyes-Housholder
Explaining the paths women must take—and the barriers they face—to become President

Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice, by Sarah M. Rios
Explores how marginalized communities organized to combat a public health crisis

Tautua: Service and Disability Activism in Sāmoa, by Juliann Anesi
A feminist ethnography that explores how women established two schools for students living with disabilities in 1970s Oceania

Asian Ameritopias: Asian American Speculative Fictions, by Stephen Hong Sohn
Analyzing themes of social justice for Asian Americans in a literary supergenre

The Heartland of U.S. Empire: Race, Region, and the Queer Filipinx Midwest, by Thomas Xavier Sarmiento
Queers the conventional understandings of region, nation, diaspora, and empire by analyzing literary and visual cultural representations of Filipinxs in the Midwest

Activism, Majority Rule, and Local Democracy: Rethinking Public Influence, Brian E. Adams
Is more local activism a solution to our political ills?

Women and Regulation: Challenging the Status Quo, edited by Sara R. Rinfret and Michelle C. Pautz
What is it like to be a woman in a regulatory environment?

Between Belonging and Exclusion: The Intersections of Integration and Anti-Discrimination Politics, by Lara-Zuzan Golesorkhi
Highlights the lived experiences of refugee women in the German labor market

Governing Genealogies of International Film Education, edited by Hadi Gharabaghi and Terri Ginsberg
A multifaceted forat into the complexities and contradictions of educational cinema and cinema education

Action = Vie: A History of AIDS Activism and Gay Politics in France, by Christophe Broqua with a Foreword by David M. Halperin
Chronicling the history and accomplishments of Act Up-Paris

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, Anthropology, art, asian american studies, Asian Studies, civil rights, cultural studies, Disability Studies, drama, economics/business, Education, environment, ethics, gender studies, health, History, immigration, Jewish, Labor Studies, Latin American studies, latinos, law & criminology, LGBT studies, literature, Mass Media and Communications, Music, Philadelphia, philosophy, photography, political science, race and ethnicity, racism, Religion, sexuality, sociology, transnational politics, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Digital Girlhoods

Posted on January 28, 2025 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Katherine Phelps, author of Digital Girlhoods, writes about tween girls and social media.

These days, social media itself is trending. Conversations abound surrounding the recent 12-hour TikTok “ban,” when the platform went dark the night of Saturday, January 18th, and came back online again for most users by Sunday afternoon. Few social media platforms have enjoyed the level of popularity that TikTok has had since 2020, when social distancing during the early days of COVID-19 resulted in more people on their phones more often. Fresh data from Pew Research Center and YouGov indicates that approximately 160 million Americans are regular users of the app, with 10- to 19-year-olds accounting for a full quarter of that number. This is the largest user demographic of TikTok in the United States, with American girls outnumbering American boys on the app.

Although this very brief national reprieve from TikTok heightened discourse around freedom of speech and expression on social media, concerns about the well-being of young people online have been raised regularly for several years, especially when it comes to girls. In 2023, which popular media dubbed “The Year of the Girl,” the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory calling for a warning label on social media, citing apps as a “major factor” in the mental-health crisis of American teens. And in a world first, in November 2024 the Australian Parliament passed the Online Safety Amendment, which bans anyone under the age of 16 from joining social media platforms. It remains to be seen how effective enforcement will be when the ban gradually goes into effect later in 2025.

Yet, research findings across disciplines are equivocal in their take on the impacts of social media on girls. Some findings suggest that social media magnifies gendered issues such as negative body image, bullying, disordered eating, poor mental health, and Internet addiction. Others indicate social media has much potential for empowerment, agency, joy, and creation, and is a space where girls can talk about issues relevant to their lives, express themselves, build community, increase self-esteem, have fun, learn digital literacy skills, and garner new interests. Notably, we have significantly less data on American girls under the age of 13 who use social media, as they are (theoretically) federally protected under COPPA (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). But tween girls are everywhere on social media and to date there has been little research that puts the voices of girls front and center in conversations about what social media means to them.

Digital Girlhoods explores this question of what social media means to American tween girls. My interest in the tween-girl demographic was sparked in 2013, when I stumbled upon a YouTube trend called “Am I Pretty or Ugly?”, in which tween girls ask their viewers to comment on their videos and indicate, as the question suggests, if they are pretty or ugly. The adult-centered panic and perturbation that reverberated in response to the trend left me wondering, why this shock and awe at girls asking this age-old question? I saw that the uproar around the trend was painting too simplistic a picture, and the response did little to question why tween girls were asking this question on a public digital platform.

I wanted to know more about the contemporary conditions of American girls living in the digital age. I studied nearly 300 of these Pretty or Ugly YouTube videos and conducted interviews with 26 tween girls (all between the ages of 10 and 13). Here are some things I learned.

  • Being pretty remains of the utmost importance to girls, especially as they connect it with being “liked.”
  • While some girls feel there is pressure to compare themselves to other girls, many articulate social media as a place to self-represent and build confidence.
  • Tween girls want to be seen and heard, and they don’t see themselves or their experiences accurately represented in popular media.
  • Girls define cyberbullying differently from how adult stakeholders and social research define it.
  • Tween girls are wary of strangers online; they greatly value privacy and primarily only communicate with people on social media that they know in “real” life, at school and at home, such as friends and family.
  • Tween girls understand the importance of boundaries and setting time limits on their phones, and they will often set and follow those limits themselves or with the help of a parent or guardian.
  • Tween girls both love and hate social media. They find aspects of it tiresome, distressing, or “drama-filled,” but they primarily use it for communicating with friends, expressing themselves, exploring interests, having fun, trying new things, playing with media production, and sharing their voices and ideas. Having grown up with it as a normal part of their daily lives, they have a hard time imagining what life would be like without it.

Social media reflects social life; it encapsulates the good and the bad. It can have negative impacts on well-being, spread misinformation, and cultivate unhealthy comparison. And it is also a place where tween girls create, connect with each other, build community, and figure themselves out via digital participation. If we are going to argue for the removal of girls from social media platforms for “their own well-being,” as adult stakeholders in tween girls’ lives we should look inward and examine our own relationships with these platforms and take the time to  hear girls when they tell us about their experiences online. They have plenty to say.

Filed under: american studies, cultural studies, Education, gender studies, health, Mass Media and Communications, sociology, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Inside stories of adoption

Posted on June 12, 2024 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Marianne Novy, author of Adoption Memoirs, writes about how a new documentary series depicts an adoption case.

The Tribeca Festival is currently premiering a three-part documentary series, An Update on our Family, about Myka and James Stauffer, who adopted a boy from China, discovered he had severe autism, and nearly three years after the adoption, with the help of an agency, had him placed in another home. The Stauffers had posted much of the adoption process and their other family life on their YouTube channel. The series is named after the casual title they used to announce his departure. They had named their child Huxley, weirdly suggesting the test-tube babies of Brave New World and erasing his Chinese ancestry.

No parent who figures in my book Adoption Memoirs behaved like the Stauffers. Nevertheless, many adoptive parents say in their memoirs, as the Stauffers did in their communications, that they were not prepared for how difficult raising their adopted child would be. Many adoptees write that their parents did not have sufficient education about their needs, especially if they were adopted transracially. One birthmother writes that she repeatedly tried to get the agency to convey her medical history to her child’s adoptive parents but never succeeded.

The Stauffers had four children already; apparently like several adoptive parent memoirists they were surprised that raising their adopted child was different. The one memoirist I discuss whose son has autism, Ralph Savarese, knew about the condition already because his wife was the therapist. They had no other children, focused all their child-rearing energies on D. J., got a team of helpers, and were gloriously happy at every skill he mastered, including writing poetry.  After the memoir was published, he graduated cum laude from Oberlin.

Stories of difficult child-rearing can be fascinating, whether told from the parent’s viewpoint or that of the child. In writing Adoption Memoirs, I was somewhat in the position of Rachel Mason, director of An Update on Our Family, analyzing key moments in how people told their story, but I never dealt with adoptive parents who made such a drastic decision, or who got money from companies who advertised on their YouTube channels. Instead, Adoption Memoirs tries to promote more understanding of people involved with adoption, whether adoptive parents, adoptees who wanted to connect with their ancestry, or mothers who gave up their children soon after birth under pressure of strict economic and social conditions.

There is a stockpile of newspaper articles about meetings between adult adoptees and their birthparents, and another stockpile of articles about children arriving from other countries to meet their adoptive parents. But these do not give the picture of what happens in the time before and after such events, as do many of the memoirs I discuss. And they do not add perspective by putting together stories of similar events told from different points of view.

While researching background for this book, I learned that many international adoptions depend on adoptive parents having the false belief that the child has no living parents and birthparents having the false belief that their children are just going away to be educated in the U.S. and will return to support them later. And I learned that domestic adoptions are much more frequent in the United States than in any other developed country, largely because other countries give more financial help to single parents. I learned that open adoptions, while an improvement, do not erase birthmothers’ trauma. And I gained insight into the struggles of many brave memoirists, watching them deal with obstacles and learn from their mistakes.

While I am curious about the documentary series, and may hate-watch it, I would take these memoirs over the Stauffers’ YouTube channel any day.

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, Anthropology, asian american studies, cultural studies, Disability Studies, drama, Education, ethics, health, History, immigration, literature, Mass Media and Communications, philosophy, race and ethnicity, sociology, transnational politics, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Teaching Fear

Posted on January 11, 2023 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, Nicole Rader, author of Teaching Fear explains how parents’ fear of crime influences how they (think they) protect their children.

Parents who watch the news regularly see images of kidnapping and homicide victims and hear about school and mass shootings. Most recently, parents were bombarded with images of four young college students at the University of Idaho who were brutally murdered while sleeping.  These horrific and fear-producing crimes make parents think twice about sending their children to school, activities outside the home, or anywhere. Parents teach kids how to protect themselves from crime when they are away from home and provide a variety of lessons about stranger danger. Studies have found that up to 70% of parents are afraid of crime for their children. A recent Gallup poll study found that one in three parents recently said that they were worried about their children being a victim of a school shooting. Fear of crime is high on the list of things parents worry about for their children.

Parents may be surprised to hear that most of their fears for their children are based on myths passed down from generation to generation and reinforced by the media. These myths emphasize a fear of strangers, a fear for young, white girls, and a belief that if one tries hard enough, victimization can be prevented.

Most parents are surprised to learn that strangers rarely hurt children. When children are victimized, they are typically victimized by a family member. 

Parents are also surprised to hear that children are rarely kidnapped, and a known offender typically takes those children who are kidnapped.

Finally, research has found that school shootings are sporadic and that children are actually safer at school than almost anywhere else, including the home.  

In other words, the reality of crimes against children looks quite different from what most parents have been taught to believe about crime and victimization. What this means for parents is that they often worry about the wrong types of crimes, people, and locations of crimes happening to their children. Crime myths, then, fuel fears of strangers, fears of kidnapping, fears of school shootings, and fears of public spaces, but, ultimately, when children are kidnapped or hurt by others, it is almost always a known person in a private location (like a home). 

Parents operating with misinformation make choices on keeping children safe by taking a litany of precautions that will have little payoff in protecting children from crime. Because of fears related to stranger danger, parents avoid public locations, restrict children from being alone outside (even in the front yard), track children on their phones, and expect constant communication with their children when they are unsupervised. This exhaustive list becomes the gold standard for protecting our children. 

What this list does not include are actionable items parents can take to arm their children with accurate knowledge about crime and victimization.  The conversations with children about how to talk to others if someone they know hurts them or how to seek help when they know about friends who are being hurt by loved ones are lacking by most parents. These conversations seem harder to most parents than talking about stranger danger.  

Teaching Fear examines where parents learn crime myths—from socialization agents like parents to school, and the media—and how these agents influence what parents teach their own children. I spent 20 years researching fear of crime and safety precautions, and did a deep dive into other research, public policy, and public opinion on crime to not only outline the problem of how we teach fear to children today, but also provides parents with the tools to “teach fear better.”  

Filed under: Education, ethics, gender studies, law & criminology, Mass Media and Communications, sociology, Urban Studies, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

A Q&A with Valerie Harrison and Kathryn Peach D’Angelo

Posted on November 18, 2020 by gkramer

This week in North Philly Notes, the coauthors of Do Right by Me talk about how they developed their book-length conversation about how to best raise Black children in white communities.

Is Do Right by Me just for white parents of black children?
Both: No, the book is useful not only for white adoptive parents of black children but also for anyone engaged in parenting and nurturing black children, including black or interracial families of origin. Do Right by Me also provides insights and tools to a broad audience of social scientists, child and family counselors, community organizations, and other educators who engage issues of transracial adoption or child development or who explore current experiences in the areas of social justice and institutionalized racism. All readers will learn how race impacts the way the world interacts with a black child, and the way they as adults can provide all black children with the knowledge and awareness to resiliently face these challenges.

Do Right by Me is designed to “orient par­ents and other community members to the ways race and racism will affect a black child’s life, and despite that, how to raise and nurture healthy and happy children.” It’s less a “how to” and more of “what to know or learn.” Can you explain your approach?
Katie: My husband Mike and I are white, and we adopted a beautiful biracial boy at birth in 2011. It was clear to us that white parents of black children want to parent well but have real questions and concerns about racism, culture, and identity. Unlike parents who buy into a “color-blind” or “post-racial” ideology, Mike and I had to confront head-on the reality that we would need to equip our biracial son for an experience far more complex than anything we had experienced. Do Right by Me is designed as a back and forth exchange between Val and me. Val has a doctorate in African American studies and lived experiences as a black woman. We engage the world through the lens of our experience, informed by our professional lives as educators. Each chapter includes a story from our personal experience supported by research and offer practical tips to put ideas into action.

How important are cross-racial relationships to a better understanding of what’s happening in America now?
Both: Dialogue about racism can be difficult and benefits from a knowledge of history, as well as a vocabulary of ideas and practice. Essential to the task is an understanding of racism and how systems continue to perpetuate privileges and disadvantages that black people have to navigate in ways that white people may never have had to. The safety and security of a 20-year friendship allowed us to have that difficult conversation. 

You have known each other for 20 years. How did you become such good friends?
Val: Katie and I have worked together at Temple University for almost 20 years. What began as a professional relationship grew into a close friendship. We talk almost every day. We each were one of the handful of supporters sitting in the room as the other defended a doctoral dissertation. Katie was the person in the room taking notes as surgeons spoke too fast and with terminology too unfamiliar for me to fully grasp how they would remove the cancer from my body, but she got it all down. We share secrets. I am her lawyer, and she is my uncredentialed therapist.

How did you approach topics of black hair, the black church, and Gabe’s experiences playing on a soccer team where “no one looked like me”—that cause someone discomfort?
Both: We guide readers on this journey using both of our voices, each in turn. When one of us presents a new idea, the other will recall a scenario that shows how it works in real life; when one of us remembers a question she faced, the other will jump in with the research and insight to put it into perspective and help readers think through it.

There are discussions of the challenges race and racism present for a black child, particularly challenges related to self-esteem. Can you discuss your focus on this factor in a child’s life?
Both: The health and well-being of a black child depend on the extent to which they feel positively about being black. A poor sense of one’s self as a black person results in low self-esteem and hinders the academic and personal achievement of black children. Conversely, positive racial identity results in high self-esteem and academic performance, as well as a greater ability to navigate racism. If parents don’t work on constructing a positive Black self-identity for their children, our culture will construct a negative self-identity around their blackness for them.

You write throughout the book about the importance of developing a positive racial identity and cite that transracially adopted children often struggle to develop a positive racial/ethnic identi­ty. Can you describe a few of the ways to do that and some of the pitfalls to avoid as you encourage readers to navigate the racism that is entrenched in American society?
Both: There are a number of forces at work that threaten positive identity in black children. One example is the creation and proliferation of negative images of black people. News reports exaggerate negative portrayals of black people, overrepresenting them in stories about poverty and crime and underrepresenting them in positive stories about their leadership, community involvement and family life. Shielding black children from negative and imbalanced messages while saturating them with positive and balanced counterimages have been found to be effective in building positive black identity and self-esteem while reducing the negative impact of racism on identity development.

Katie, I like that you explain that your worldview and cultural paradigm shifted after Gabriel. Can you talk about that process?
Katie: I was operating within a different cultural paradigm. One that was more Eurocentric and imposed upon its participants a notion that you are only good enough and have enough if you measure up to a predetermined set of standards, largely informed and dictated by the white people who designed them. And one that judged others as inferior in order to feel superior. Gabriel helped me see more clearly that the worldview and value system that I feel most at home in, is neither the only one available, nor the best. The mindset that I inherited certainly wasn’t doing me any good, and my desire to shift gears brought me the greatest gift of my life.

Do Right by Me includes info on “The Talk.” In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement this summer, what observations (and optimism) do you have about social change and awareness?
Katie: If anything, this moment (the murder of George Floyd) may finally dispel the myth that we are living in a post-racial America. It is only now as a mother that I understand how very different it all was for me because of the color of my skin. My husband and I understand that our decisions and behaviors, that were read as assertive or a normal testing of boundaries, may be read as disorderly, defiant, or even threatening if we were not white. Our world does not give our son the privilege of acting like us, and it places the burden unfairly on him to manage how others feel about him.

Filed under: african american studies, american studies, cultural studies, Education, ethics, health, Philadelphia, race and ethnicity, racism, sociology, women's studies | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started