Are family influences on youth declining in importance? Are parents less important in shaping the life orientations and achievements of youth than they were a generation ago? What about the consequences of divorce? 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...

Are family influences on youth declining in importance? Are parents less important in shaping the life orientations and achievements of youth than they were a generation ago? What about the consequences of divorce? 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...