And the Republican Party especially associates the market with the idea of progress, goodness, family, and points us toward the mall as an answer to all our personal dreams.

Paradoxically, those who call for family values also tout the wonders of an unregulated market without observing the subtle cultural links between the family they seek to regulate and the market they hold free.

Many working families are both prisoners and architects of the time bind in which they find themselves.

Just as the archetype of the supermom--the woman who can do it all--minimizes the real needs of women, so too the archetype of the"superkid" minimizes the real needs of children. It makes it all right to treat a young child as if he or she were older.

Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?

The "female culture" has shifted more rapidly than the "male culture"; the image of the go-get 'em woman has yet to be fully matched by the image of the let's take-care-of-the-kids- together man. More important, over the last thirty years, men's underlying feelings about taking responsibility at home have changed much less than women's feelings have changed about forging some kind of identity at work.

Children born of married parents in America face a higher risk of seeing them break up than children born of unmarried parents in Sweden.