To progress successfully through all of their stages of development, children need to grow up in good communities. Good communities do not occur without viable, productive families. In Restoring Power to Parents and Places, author Richard Kordesh makes a compelling call for the productive family’s renewal and provides creative steps for parents, professionals, and policymakers to take to strengthen communities around all children.

Kordesh’s experiences as a planner, professor, and father, have taught him that productive families are vitally important to the creation of good communities around children. He details historically, and with contemporary examples, the forces in our society that place stresses on families in all sectors. Restoring Power to Parents and Places presents a pointed critique of economic and political forces that have harmed families, but it also offers practical suggestions for action by parents, community leaders, community development and planning professionals, and governments at the local, state, and federal levels.

Restoring Power to Parents and Places celebrates the productive potentials of a family’s habitat, and it provides tools for empowering families—giving them more time and ability to raise their children.

Family generated community building will strengthen parents’ relationships with one another and with their children. It will encourage and protect the thick, multidimensional roles that can result. It will press for community institutions and policy institutions to help them acquire decent housing that could foster productive family activities.

It would work with schools to build coproductive relationships with parents, including training for parents who needed their own literacy skills to be enhanced. Family generated community building would assist families to work with the land on their properties and in their neighborhoods, enabling them to improve their diets, offset their expenses, and generally gain more control of their lives through family and community gardening.

Richard Kordesh earned a PhD from Indiana University at Bloomington. He has worked professionally in the community development field for thirty-five years and has taught community development and public policy courses. He and his wife, Maureen, have four children. They live in Oak Park, Illinois, where they practice and learn from the ever-changing productive family habitat lifestyle.