Continuity and Change in the American Family

Continuity and Change in the American Family engages students with issues they see every day in the news, providing them with a comprehensive description of the social demography of the American family. Understanding ever-changing family systems and patterns requires taking the pulse of contemporary family life from time to time. This book paints a portrait of family continuity and change in the later half of the 20^th century, with a focus on data from the 1970′s to present. The authors explore such topics as the growth in cohabitation, changes in childbearing, and how these trends affect family life. Other topics include the changing lives of single mothers, fathers, and grandparents and increasing economic disparities among families; child care and child well-being; and combining paid work and family. The authors are talented writers who bring considerable professional and scholarly background to bear in illuminating this topic in a thoughtful yet lively presentation. 

 Lynne M. Casper received her Ph.D. in demography and sociology from Penn State in 1992. She is currently Health Scientist Administrator and Demographer in the Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She is also director of NICHD’s training program in population studies and is program officer for many national data collection efforts. She has published numerous scholarly articles in the areas of families and households, cohabitation, fatherhood, childcare, voting and demographic methods. She previously spent 7 years as a Demographer and Statistician in the Fertility and Family Statistics Branch at the U.S. Census Bureau where she was senior analyst for the family and households, childcare and voting programs. She has authored nearly a dozen Census Bureau Current Population Reports. She was awarded Vice-President Gore’s Hammer Award for her work on fatherhood with the Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. She is currently a member of the NICHD Family and Child Well-being Research Network and the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics.

Suzanne M. Bianchi received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 1978. She is currently Professor of Sociology and Faculty Associate in the Center on Population, Gender, and Social Inequality, at the University of Maryland and also an Affiliate Faculty member of the Women’s Studies Department and the School of Public Affairs. Prior to her current position, she was a U.S. Census Bureau demographer for 15 years and served as Assistant Chief for Social and Demographic Statistics in the Bureau’s Population Division in 1993-94. Her recent publications explore the interrelationship between maternal employment and time with children, women’s financial status and the probability of divorce, the gender division of housework, the relationship among marriage, children, and women’s employment, the feminization and juvenilization of poverty, the economic well-being of nonresident fathers and custodial mothers, and children’s use of time. She served as President of the Population Association of America in 2000 and has chaired the Population and Family Sections of the American Sociological Association as well as guest edited a special volume of Demography on "Men in Families" in 1998.