“Save My Kid”: How Families of Critically Ill Children Cope, Hope, and Negotiate an Unequal Healthcare System

Abstract

explore the social realities of diverse family forms and that greater weight should have been given to the structural, cultural, economic, and political factors—particularly with respect to race and gender—that create unequal and unfair playing fields for single parents and people living in diverse family arrangements and that could be substantially improved, if policy-makers were committed to doing so. In their Introduction, Florsheim and Moore address the question of race and ethnicity but say that, though they will ‘‘discuss race, ethnicity, racism, [and] discrimination,’’ they ‘‘are not experts in racism or discrimination’’ and that ‘‘drawing racial and ethnic distinctions between fathers is not [their] primary focal point’’ (p. 16). Had Florsheim and Moore made a different decision on this count (e.g., upped their expertise and/or the expertise of their team, given the goals of their study and the composition of their sample), they might have been open to offering a more expansive interpretation of their interviews, questionnaires, and observations. Florsheim and Moore’s position is not new or unique but has been part of a conversation about fatherhood for a very long time, and a variety of assessments have been published over the years, some of them coming from the perspective of critical race theory, critical gender theory, and intersectionality theory. Although Florsheim and Moore seem at times to acknowledge these issues and critiques, they would have done well to use some of the space that the publisher afforded them to directly incorporate, and expressly respond to, the writings of these theorists. ‘‘Save My Kid’’: How Families of Critically Ill Children Cope, Hope, and Negotiate an Unequal Healthcare System, by Amanda M. Gengler. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 256 pp. $30.00 paper. ISBN: 9781479864621.