Ties That Stress: New Family Imbalance - Hardcover

Elkind...is as much a child advocate as an intellectual guru, and his dissection of what's gone wrong for children in America today is written with passion and clarity. In style and content...this book is addressed to the general reader...[It] seeks to answer the question: What should we do as traditional family structures seem to be crumbling?...[Elkind] thinks the solution lies with a change in parental behavior. He sees contemporary families 'stumbling' toward a new balance between the needs of the children and the needs of the parents, one that integrates the mutual responsibility of the traditional family with the freedoms of the contemporary family...Let's hope that Elkind is right.--Douglas J. Besharov "Washington Post Book World " This book has many strengths, the first being that it is a well-documented study of family life. The author consistently builds on his past work and cites outstanding scholars as he traces the history of family life...This book is a valuable contribution to the vast body of literature that focuses on families. It provides a clear picture of why family life has changed...[and] aids in clarifying the strengths and weaknesses of idealized family life.--Sharon J. Price "Phi Kappa Phi Journal " Elkind's book should be read for its contribution to understanding recent changes in the American family, and for its important, yet debatable, application of the concept of postmodernism to the family.--James T. Mathieu "New Oxford Review " Elkind's new book sums up the changes we are all witnessing and their cost to children. A very good, worthwhile book written by someone from the inside.'--T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., author of "Touchpoints" A thoughtful effort, one of the most thoughtful I have come across, to...make sense of the overpowering changes that have taken place within a generation...A powerful new analysis of how family life in general has changed over the law thirty years, altering not just the experience of childhood but that of adulthood as well...Building on a complete substructure of work in social history, psychology, and social research, Elkind develops a systematic argument for how we got from then to now, from the nuclear family of the modern period to the fragmented family of the postmodern.--Edward Shorter, Ph.D. "Readings: A Journal of Reviews and Commentary in Mental Health "

What has happened to the American family in the last few decades? And what are these changes doing to our children? A renowned child psychologist and author of several influential works on child development, David Elkind has devoted his career to these urgent questions. This book - the culmination of his inquiry - puts together all the pieces, puzzling facts, and conflicting accounts, and demonstrates what the American family has become. Today's postmodern family is under enormous stress. And as a result, the needs of hurried children have been sacrificed to the needs of their harried parents. Childhood innocence has been superseded by the illusion of childhood competence; teenage immaturity has given way to pseudo-sophistication, and parental intuition has been traded in for a mechanical reliance on technique. These changes and a host of others have undermined the well-being of children and adolescents. From Freud to Friedan to Foucault, Elkind traces the roots of the postmodern family back to the failure of the modern nuclear family and its bolstering institutions - the media, the so-called helping professions, the legal system, and the schools - to meet the needs of parents. The new postmodern family is more flexible, more permeable, more urbane, but also out of balance - and vulnerable. Having thrown off the modern myths of romance, maternal love, and domestic bliss, the American family is finding its postmodern substitutes wanting. Treated like miniature adults, today's children and adolescents go without the protection and security they need, while their once-sheltered babyboomer parents secretly wonder why they've never really felt like grown-ups. However, Elkind finds evidence of an emerging vital family that combines the best of modern and postmodern, a family in which the needs of "all" members are understood and held in a dynamic, if delicate, balance.