Ho Families Still Matter A Longitudinal Study of Youth in To Generations [Hardcover]

Offers surprising findings about the strength of family influence on children's careers and achievements.This book casts doubt on much of the conventional wisdom about family decline during the last decades of the 20th century. The authors, drawing from the longest-running longitudinal study of families in the world, compare the influence of parents on the Baby Boomer generation with that of Baby-Boomer parents on their own Generation-X children. They find that parents are no less important in shaping the life orientations and achievements of youth than they were a generation ago, despite changes affecting families, such as higher rates of divorce and maternal employment.This book casts doubt on much of the conventional wisdom about family decline during the last decades of the 20th century. The authors, drawing from the longest-running longitudinal study of families in the world, compare the influence of parents on the Baby Boomer generation with that of Baby-Boomer parents on their own Generation-X children. They find that parents are no less important in shaping the life orientations and achievements of youth than they were a generation ago, despite changes affecting families, such as higher rates of divorce and maternal employment.Are family influences on youth declining in importance? Are parents less important in shaping the life orientations and achievements of youth than they were a generation ago? What about the consequences of divorce? How Families Still Matter casts doubt on the conventional wisdom about family decline during the last decades of the twentieth century. The authors draw from the longest-running longitudinal study of families in the world--the Longitudinal Study of Generations, conducted at the University of Southern California--to discover whether parents are really less critical in shaping the life choices and achievements of their children than they were a generation ago. They compare the influence of parents on the Baby Boomer generationlƒ&