How Families Still Matter

Offers surprising findings about the strength of family influence on children's careers and achievements.

This book casts doubt on much of the common wisdom about family decline during the last decades of the twentieth century. It finds that parents are no less important in shaping the careers and achievements of youth than they were a generation ago, despite divorce and working mothers.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 self-confidence, values, and levels of achievement) on the Baby Boomer generation with that of Baby-Boomer parents on their own Generation-X children. The findings may surprise many readers. Generation-X youth showed higher levels of education, career attainments, and self-esteem than their parents as youth, and similar values were found across generations. They indicate the 'resilience' of family bonds across generations even against the backdrop of massive social and family changes since the 1960s.