National Council On Family Relations Honours University Of Massachusetts Amherst Professor

Maureen Perry-Jenkins has received the 2022 Alexis J. Walker Award for Lifetime Achievement in Feminist Family Studies from the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR). Perry-Jenkins is a professor and current chair of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

This award recognizes her decades of contributions to feminist family scholarship, leadership and service to NCFR. The award review committee noted her ongoing scholarship on working class families as essential to the field. Perry-Jenkins was conferred the award at the 2022 NCFR conference where she gave an address entitled “Work Matters: Lessons from Alexis Walker”.

Perry-Jenkins is a nationally renowned scholar whose contributions on the national, state, regional, and university levels have had a profound impact on family research and policy that addresses how families manage the demands of work and family life. Her work focuses on the ways in which socio-cultural factors such as race, gender and social class shape work-family processes and are related to the quality of family relationships and the well-being of parents and their children.

Perry-Jenkins has authored a new book, “Work Matters: How Parents’ Jobs Shape Children’s Well-Being,” (Princeton University Press, 2022) which proposes ways to reimagine low-wage work to sustain families and their children’s development. Using over 20 years of longitudinal data, Perry-Jenkins demonstrates how low-wage jobs, for better and for worse, affect parents’ well-being and children’s long-term development.