Family Trouble | Middle-Class Parents, Children's Problems, and the Disruption of Everyday Life

Ara Francis

ISBN 10: 0813570522 / ISBN 13: 9780813570525

Published by Rutgers University Press, 2015

About this Item

Family Trouble | Middle-Class Parents, Children's Problems, and the Disruption of Everyday Life | Ara Francis | Taschenbuch | Einband - flex.(Paperback) | Englisch | 2015 | Rutgers University Press | EAN 9780813570525 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Mare Nostrum Group B.V., Doelen 72, 4831 GR BREDA, NIEDERLANDE, gpsr[at]mare-nostrum[dot]co[dot]uk | Anbieter: preigu.

Seller Inventory # 131263302

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Family Trouble | Middle-Class Parents, Children's Problems, and the Disruption of Everyday Life
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813570522
• ISBN 13: 9780813570525
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 229W x 152H x 11D millimeters 229 millimeters width by 152 millimeters height by 11 millimeters depth
• Weight: 281 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Bücher

About this title

Synopsis

Our children mean the world to us. They are so central to our hopes and dreams that we will do almost anything to keep them healthy, happy, and safe. What happens, then, when a child has serious problems? In Family Trouble, a compelling portrait of upheaval in family life, sociologist Ara Francis tells the stories of middle-class men and women whose children face significant medical, psychological, and social challenges. 
 
Francis interviewed the mothers and fathers of children with such problems as depression, bi-polar disorder, autism, learning disabilities, drug addiction, alcoholism, fetal alcohol syndrome, and cerebral palsy. Children’s problems, she finds, profoundly upset the foundations of parents’ everyday lives, overturning taken-for-granted expectations, daily routines, and personal relationships. Indeed, these problems initiated a chain of disruption that moved through parents’ lives in domino-like fashion, culminating in a crisis characterized by uncertainty, loneliness, guilt, grief, and anxiety. Francis looks at how mothers and fathers often differ in their interpretation of a child’s condition, discusses the gendered nature of child rearing, and describes how parents struggle to find effective treatments and to successfully navigate medical and educational bureaucracies. But above all, Family Trouble examines how children’s problems disrupt middle-class dreams of the “normal” family. It captures how children’s problems “radiate” and spill over into other areas of parents’ lives, wreaking havoc even on their identities, leading them to reevaluate deeply held assumptions about their own sense of self and what it means to achieve the good life.  

Engagingly written, Family Trouble offers insight to professionals and solace to parents. The book offers a clear message to anyone in the throes of family trouble: you are in good company, and you are not as different as you might feel...

About the Author

ARA FRANCIS is an assistant professor of sociology at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts..