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 20th 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.
In Continuity and Change in the American Family, Lynne Casper and Suzanne Bianchi lead us on a journey through family life in the contemporary U.S. and recent changes therein. They provide a comprehensive and rich description of the social demography of the family. Like Rogers, Hummer, and Nam, they are painstaking and careful and do an outstanding job synthesizing, reporting and summarizing an enormous amount of material.
Topics include cohabitation, childbearing, single mother families, fathering, grandparenthood, child care, child wellbeing, the economic causes and consequences of family structure, combining work and family. Each of these topics, in themselves, is nearly a tome. (For example, the chapter entitled "Economic Causes and Consequences of Changing Family Structure" includes treatment of trends in income and poverty; the feminization of poverty; changing employment and earnings of women; declining male wages; the juvenilization of poverty; children's material hardship; income inequality; the linkage between changing economics and family formation; the importance of male income for marriage market; women's economic independence; and the consequences of marital disruption for mothers and fathers.)
Throughout, Casper and Bianchi provide a rich blend of past research and theory along with original analyses of new data. These analyses suggest a "quieting" of family change and kudos to the authors for never letting the truth be compromised by exaggerated claims.
I know my fellow Committee and Section members join me in congratulating you for jobs well done -- producing works that belong on all of our shelves, those of our students, those of policymakers, and those curious about state-of-the-art knowledge about mortality and the family. It is a joy and an honor to present the 2002 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography to Lynne Casper and Suzanne Bianchi, and to Rick Rogers, Bob Hummer, and Charles Nam.
