Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America - Hardcover

The middle-class American Dream is imploding. Squeezed shows how the high cost of parenthood and our unstable job market got us here and offers surprising solutions for improving our condition.

Families today are squeezed on every side—from high child care costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become nearly impossible.

Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through gripping storytelling and elegant prose, Quart shows how our country has failed its families. Her subjects—from professors to lawyers to caregivers to nurses—have been wrung out by a system that doesn’t support them, and enriches only a tiny elite.

Interlacing her own experience with close-up reporting on families that are just getting by, Quart reveals parenthood itself to be financially overwhelming, except for the wealthiest. She also provides real solutions, outlining necessary policy shifts, as well as detailing the DIY tactics some families have embraced. And she offers a blueprint for helping us to see parenting and caregiving as truly valuable, not only emotionally but professionally and politically.

Written in the spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich and Jennifer Senior, Squeezed is an eye-opening page-turner. Powerfully argued, deeply reported, and ultimately hopeful, it casts a bright, clarifying light on families struggling to thrive in an economy that holds too few options. It will make readers think differently about their lives and those of their neighbors.

Alissa Quart  is the executive editor of the journalism non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She co-founded its current incarnation with Barbara Ehrenreich. She is also the author of four previous acclaimed books, “Branded,’’ “Republic of Outsiders,’’ “Hothouse Kids’’ and the poetry book “Monetized.’’ She writes the Outclassed column for The Guardian and has published features and reported commentary in many magazines and newspapers, most recently for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Nation and The New York Review of Books. She has won the Columbia Journalism School’s 2018 Alumni Award and the LA Press Club Award for Commentary, was a 2010 Nieman fellow at Harvard University, and has been nominated for an Emmy and a National Magazine Award.