A personal, intimate account of the extraordinary ways that today’s families are being created.

From adoption and assisted reproduction, to gay and straight parents, coupled and single, and multi-parent families, the stories in Modern Families explain how individuals make unconventional families by accessing a broad range of technological, medical and legal choices that expand our definitions of parenting and kinship. Joshua Gamson introduces us to a child with two mothers, made with one mother’s egg and the sperm of a man none of them has ever met; another born in Ethiopia, delivered by his natural grandmother to an orphanage after both his parents died in close succession, and then to the arms of his mother, who is raising him solo.
These tales are deeply personal and political. The process of forming these families involved jumping tremendous hurdles—social conventions, legal and medical institutions—with heightened intention and inventiveness, within and across multiple inequities and privileges. Yet each of these families, however they came to be, shares the same universal joys that all families share.
A companion for all those who choose to navigate the world of modern kinship, Modern Families provides a “fascinating look at the remarkable range of experiences that is broadening the very idea of family” (Booklist).

"[T]hese tales area warmhearted and normalizing look at some rare kinds of families." - Choice

"[A] fascinating look at the remarkable range of experiences that is broadening the very idea of family." - Booklist

"Gamson successfully weaves together the personal and the academic throughout the book. He takes personal stories and situates them in more complicated institutions and social structures." - Brain Child Magazine

"The various stories of family creation told inModern Families--the struggles and the successes--are quite moving." - Brain, Child Magazine

"[Gamson] shares their tales with an engaging, gently humorous, and at times poetic style. At the same time, he also teases out the connections between individual family stories and the social systems in which they are immersed." - Philadelphia Gay News

"What is so deft aboutModern Familiesis the ease with which Gamson weaves together individual stories about creating families with academic research about the process, from single parenthood to gay parenting to reproductive technologieshe describes the often heart-wrenching emotional and technological lengths they had to go to. There are moments in all these accounts that will bring you to tears." - In These Times

"Rich in dramatic tensions, private passions and public and political moral complexities, these 'creation stories' of having children in unusual family contexts make the famous tale of descending from Lady Bracknell's handbag pale in comparison." - Times Higher Education

"InModern Families, Gamson offers both the personal and the critical perspectives. The stories of the journeys to kinship are beautifully rendered, novelistic page-turners. They are told, though, in context of the overarching social forces and disparities." - PsychCentral.com

"Takes the reader on an intimate journey through some of the many extraordinary pathways to parenthood available in the early twenty-first century." - Sociological Forum