Decisions about whether to have or rear children, as well as perceptions of people who choose not to parent are linked to a variety of social processes and identities. We review literature from a variety of disciplines that focuses on voluntarily childless adults. Early research in this area, emerging in the 1970s, focused almost exclusively on heterosexual women and utilized a childless rather than a childfree framework. Later work saw a shift to a ''childless-by-choice'' or ''childfree'' framework, emphasizing that for some, not being parents is an active choice rather than an accident. While more recent research includes lesbian women and gay and heterosexual men, greater diversity within studies of adults without children is one suggested focus for future work in this area.

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In this paper we examine schooling inequalities through drawing from the contributions of racialized organizations.We apply the components of this racial theory to offer a new framework for examining racial inequalities in US K-12 schools. We analyze case studies to demonstrate how the four tenants of racialized organizations operate in three schools. In particular, we highlight how these tenants surface through schools' policies (school rules around discipline, language, and tracking) and practices (interactions between students, teachers and staff). We offer a framework for understanding how schools are shaped by the racial hierarchy at the organizational level. We close by considering implications and suggestions for future research.

The processes by which women and men decide not to have or rear children are lengthy and complex. Analysis of data from qualitative interviews with 21 women and 10 men reveals two primary themes in adults' descriptions of their decision not to have children: (1) that the decision was a decidedly conscious decision and (2) that the decision occurred as a process as opposed to a singular event. The features of these two themes are considered, as are their gendered dimensions and social and practical implications.

Homeschooling is an increasingly common schooling option for middle-class black families yet is often overlooked in research on race and education. Drawing on interviews with 67 middle-class black and white mothers living in one northeastern metropolitan area—half of whom homeschool, while the other half enroll their children in conventional school—the author examines how race influences mothers’ decisions to homeschool or conventional school. The findings show that mothers’ schooling explanations reflect their experiences as shaped by the racial hierarchy constituted in schools. Black mothers respond to a push out of conventional schools on the basis of their children’s experiences of racial discrimination. In contrast, white mothers respond to a pull out of conventional schools to individualize their children’s academic programs. Building on racialized organizations and critical race theory, these findings elucidate how the formal structure of schools is racialized in ways that constrain black mothers’ agency, while enabling the agency of white mothers to activate school choice. The findings underscore how homeschooling, often assumed to be race neutral, is racialized in ways that reproduce inequalities under school choice and appears to redress discrimination in schools.