As the world heads into the twenty-first century, individuals and their families are being confronted with a more diverse array of possible life experiences than has ever existed before. Changes in longevity, marriage, fertility, employment, and many other areas have created new opportunities for individual and family choice and variability in life course experiences. American Families and the Future discusses a variety of issues that face and will continue to families in coming years and describes various strategies families can use in their decisionmaking processes. This enlightening book is divided into five main sections: Demographic Issues; Social and Economic Issues; Technological Issues; Family Process in Shaping the Future; and Family Vision in Creating the Future. Individual chapters view family problem solving from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. American Families and the Future: describes recent demographic trends and considers their implications for how individuals and their families plan and prepare for their later adult life reviews health care issues and concerns for the elderly and addresses strategies for self-health promotion and illness prevention provides examples illustrating the uses and abuses of data to promote partisan views and agendas outlines a conceptual framework that can be uses to understand problem solving and decisionmaking by individuals and family groups presents a model that explores family decisionmaking, focusing on the conditions under which decisions are made presents findings from a study of early adolescents’perceptions of their role in family decisionmaking The book closes with an upbeat discussion of possible solutions to current pathologies affecting human societies and cultures. Professionals who work with families will find this book an enlightening and encouraging guide for helping families cope with the myriad issues and choices they face in planning for their futures.

Meet the men and women whose groundbreaking work elevated the field of family studies! In Pioneering Paths in the Study of Families: The Lives and Careers of Family Scholars, you'll find 40 autobiographies written by leading scholars in sociology, family studies, psychology, and child development. Their fascinating stories demonstrate how their family experiences, educational opportunities, and occupational endeavors not only shaped the disciplines they chose but also shaped the theoretical perspectives they utilized and the topics they researched. From the editors: “These autobiographies document the experiences of scholars from the early twentieth century to the present. The descriptions of early influences on their education, of their graduate school experiences, and of their academic career paths, provides a wealth of valuable material. Since four of these scholars have died and a number are in their eighties or older, these histories provide rich case studies on factors that influence the decision to go to college, get married, pursue an advanced degree, make specific occupational choices, and investigate certain topics. These autobiographies also detail the barriers that early women scholars in the social sciences faced.” The scholars whose lives you will learn about in Pioneering Paths in the Study of Families include: Joan Aldous Katherine R. Allen Pauline Boss Carlfred B. Broderick Wesley R. Burr Catherine Street Chilman Harold T. Christensen Marilyn Coleman Rand D. Conger Randal D. Day William J. Doherty Evelyn Millis Duvall Glen H. Elder, Jr. Bernard Farber Margaret Feldman Mark A. Fine Greer Litton Fox Frank F. Furstenberg Viktor Gecas Harold D. Grotevant Gerald Handel Michael E. Lamb Ralph LaRossa Gary R. Lee Helena Znaniecka Lopata Harriette P. McAdoo Hamilton McCubbin Brent C. Miller Phyllis Moen Gerhard Neubeck Gary W. Peterson Ira L. Reiss John Scanzoni Walter R. Schumm Barbara H. Settles Laurence Steinberg Suzanne K. Steinmetz Sheldon Stryker Marvin B. Sussman Irv Tallman

"In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. Drawing on extensive research with diverse parents, this book reveals how digital technologies give personal and political parenting struggles a distinctive character, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent, or support. The book reveals the pincer movement of parenting in late modernity. Parents are both more burdened with responsibilities and charged with respecting the agency of their child-leaving much to negotiate in today's "democratic" families. The book charts how parents now often enact authority and values through digital technologies-as "screen time," games, or social media become ways of both being together and setting boundaries. The authors show how digital technologies introduce both valued opportunities and new sources of risk. To light their way, parents comb through the hazy memories of their own childhoods and look toward varied imagined futures. This results in deeply diverse parenting in the present, as parents move between embracing, resisting, or balancing the role of technology in their own and their children's lives. This book moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative research in the United Kingdom, the book offers conclusions and insights relevant to parents, policymakers, educators, and researchers everywhere"--