A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval - Hardcover

Amato, Paul R.; Booth, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674292839 ISBN 13: 9780674292833

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Just what do we know about the current generation of young Americans? So little it seems that we have dubbed them Generation X. Coming of age in the 1980s and '90s, they hail from families in flux, from an intimate landscape changing faster and more profoundly than ever before. This book is the first to give us a clear, close-up picture of these young Americans and to show how they have been affected and formed by the tremendous domestic changes of the last three decades.

How have members of this generation fared at school and at work, as they have moved into the world and formed families of their own? Do their struggles or successes reflect the turbulence of their time? These are the questions A Generation at Risk answers in comprehensive detail. Based on a unique fifteen-year study begun in 1980, the book considers parents' socioeconomic resources, their gender roles and relations, and the quality and stability of their marriages. It then examines children's relations with their parents, their intimate and broader social affiliations, and their psychological well-being. The authors provide rare insight into how both familial and historical contexts affect young people as they make the transition to adulthood.

Perhaps surprising is the authors' finding that, in this era of shifting gender roles, children who grow up in traditional father-breadwinner, mother-homemaker families and those in more egalitarian, role-sharing families apparently turn out the same. Also striking are the beneficial influence of parental education on children and the troubling long-term impact of marital conflict and divorce--an outcome that prompts the authors to suggest policy measures that encourage marital quality and stability.

About this title

About the Authors

Paul R. Amato is Professor of Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University.

Alan Booth is Professor of Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University.

Reviews

This important and disturbing book by two sociology professors at the University of Nebraska and Pennsylvania State University, respectively, carefully examines how parents' socioeconomic resources, gender roles, and degree of marital happiness affect their children's lives. Like David Popenoe's Life Without Father (LJ 2/1/96), it strikes a resounding note of alarm at recent trends in American family life. The work is based on the results of a finely drawn 15-year study of a nationwide sampling of married couples and their adult offspring. There are no glittering generalizations here; Amato and Booth provide rich contextual detail and easily readable tables as they consider, for example, the effect of maternal employment on daughters' social integration (largely positive). Divorce proneness and marital unhappiness are, to be sure, negative influences but, consistent with their subtle, detailed analyses, the authors present these factors in terms of a number of variables, including when in a child's life divorce occurs and the intensity of interparental conflict prior to divorce. Public libraries should not be deterred by this book's scholarly presentation: it speaks to us all.?Ellen Gilbert, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674292839
• ISBN 13: 9780674292833
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 340