A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval [Paperback]

Paul R. Amato (Author), Alan Booth (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674003985 | ISBN-13: 978-0674003989 | Publication Date: September 15, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

An important new book...Paul Amato and Alan Booth painstakingly analyze data from a large national sample of families, seeking especially to isolate the independent effects of divorce on children from the effects of preexisting marital conflict. The results call into question the rationalizations of our high divorce rate...Amato and Booth estimate that at most a third of divorces involving children are so distressed that the children are likely to benefit. The remainder, about 70%, involve low-conflict marriages that apparently harm children much less than do the realities of divorce...This remarkably countercultural conclusion will provoke many predictable reminders about toxic marriages and many repetitions of the familiar bromide that marital unhappiness, not 'divorce per se' is the real problem. But because of this book, we also will have a more informed discussion of the moral dimensions of the decision to divorce. Amato and Booth have helped us to recognize more clearly the potential conflicts between parental responsibility and adult desires for freedom, romance, sexual gratification and self-actualization.
--Norval D. Glenn and David Blankenhorn (Los Angeles Times )

[This] longitudinal study of the consequences of family instability and change in the USA...focused upon two generations--the parents and their offspring--and looked at how the relations between them changed over the survey time...[The] study provides an excellent opportunity to test some favorite popular assumptions--such as whether witnessing unhappiness in the parental home would lead to the inability to have happy relationships in one's own home. Or does having a 'liberated' or non-traditional mother harm children's development? The advantage of a longitudinal study is that we can examine these differences on the same people over time...This study would be of relevance to youth researchers interested in the 'life course' perspective as it provides a range of data and information of a kind which is seldom normally available...This is a well organized and documented study discussing quantitative findings in an accessible and enlightening way.
--Claire Wallace (Journal of Youth Studies )

A Generation at Risk summarizes [Amato and Booth's] pioneering longitudinal study which, between 1980 and 1992, interviewed a representative sample of 1,193 married persons with children. Amato and Booth also interviewed the adult children in 1992 and 1995. The book uses the life-course perspective and considers the impact of changing historical contexts on these families. It is intended for professionals, although the conclusions are vital to anyone who has even a passing interest in changes in contemporary families...This landmark work will frame scholarly discussions of parent-child dynamics for many years and belongs in every major library.
--Larry R. Peterson (History )

This important and disturbing book...carefully examines how parents' socioeconomic resources, gender roles, and degree of marital happiness affect their children's lives...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)...Public libraries should not be deterred by this book's scholarly presentation: it speaks to us all.
--Ellen Gilbert (Library Journal )

What are the long-term effects on children of the great changes in the family that have occurred over the past several decades?...Paul Amato and Alan Booth's impressive study is one of the first to provide us with long-term data on this generation...Theirs is one of the few longitudinal surveys to measure marital quality and then to follow offspring for a long period, during which some of the parents divorce...A Generation at Risk is an important addition to the literature on the long-term effects of families on their children.
--Andrew J. Cherlin (American Journal of Sociology )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (September 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674003985
• ISBN-13: 978-0674003989
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #959,626 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A model sociological work, March 15, 2002

By 

Lynn Xu (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval (Hardcover)

A Generation at Risk holds appeal as compelling as its subtitle suggests - Growing up in an Era of Family Upheaval. Indeed, we have probably witnessed the most rapid change of family as an institution over the past decades throughout family history. Research is numerous and has addressed many aspects induced by "family upheaval" from macro- to micro-level. Amato and Booth's work has systematically mapped the cause-effect relationship between two generations: how each set of family-of-origin's characteristics (including parents' socioeconomic status, parents' gender nontraditionalism, parents' marital quality and divorce) affect offspring's well-being of various dimensions (including children's socioeconomic status, children's quality of intimate relationship, social integration and psychological well-being). They have done a remarkable job to answer the question we all have: whether changes in family life have harmed or benefited children, and to what extent.
The great advantage of their research is to use longitudinal design to obtain information on independent variables from the parents over a period of 15 years as their offspring grew up and to obtain information on dependent variables from the offspring by the end of the study period. Therefore it avoids the inaccuracy due to retrospective errors and lowers the same-source bias. The longitudinal design especially remedies the point-in-time data provided by most surveys that are poor at measuring changes over time. It enables the researchers to analyze the data with life course theoretical framework.
However, like all surveys in which every respondent is given the same set of questions, in-depth probe cannot be pursued. The authors have drawn lots of inference that possibly or probably links the independent and the dependent variables. For example, in explaining why unmarried children of non-traditional parents tend to leave home relatively early, it is assumed that their parents encourage residential independence yet such an assumption cannot be substantiated by the given data. Another drawback lies in the sampling bias that only married parents in 1980 were chosen and the non-traditional form of families were left out.
Having said that, the data source for this research is extremely rich. Besides the standard information available such as parents' education and income, this study also has collected extensive information on the gender division of housework and childcare, gender attitudes, marriage quality, marital conflict, and divorce proneness. The measurement of offspring's well-being is also inclusive from the socioeconomic attainment to intimate relationship, from social integration to psychological well-being.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very well Researched, good methodology, February 17, 2000

By 

Geoff Matthews (West Jordan, utah USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval (Hardcover)

This book is well researched and very objective. The researcher uses extensive data sources to offer support for the claim that money has only a secondary effect, and that parental involvment is a much more important factor for child sucess. In short, to improve society, we need better parents rather than more money.

3.0 out of 5 stars insightful statistics coupled to questionable recommendation, July 16, 2001

By 

G W Thielman (Tucson, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval (Hardcover)

Professors Amato and Booth present a wealth of statistical summaries regarding families in _Risk_. The suggestion from stress indicators that marriage satisfaction among couples has diminished in recent decades presents an interesting basis for policy discussions. Some of the statistics conform to contemporary expectations, others appear contrary. The book's value stems from the synthesis of these facts. Policy recommendations however, presnt a mixed bag. As sociology professors, the authors retain an overt fondness of current fad of maximized individual freedom as embodied in "no-fault" unilateral divorce statutes that discourage marital investment and facilitate dissolution, at the expense of children. While couples in low-conflict but unsatisfactory marriages are suggested be more accommodating for the sake of children, until the law protects the interests of the non-divorcing partner and/or offspring, such recommendations will fall on deaf ears.