The way we really are

Family historian Stephanie Coontz offers a guide to the causes and consequences of today's family trends. Meticulously researched and carefully balanced, The Way We Really Are demonstrates why a historically informed perspective on changing family roles and arrangements can be as helpful in sorting through many family dilemmas as going into therapy - and much more helpful than listening to today's political debates.

Coontz argues that although we can draw some lessons from the past about how to strengthen families, we must face the reality that mothers are going to remain in the workplace, family diversity is here to stay, and the nuclear family can no longer handle all the responsibilities of elder care and child rearing. She explains how economic trends, changes in adult-teen relations, declining dependence of women on marriage, and new roles for men affect the dynamics of family life.

Some problems associated with these changes, Coontz explains, come from economic and cultural forces beyond the family; others exist not because our families have changed too much but because our institutions and values haven't changed enough.

But there is good news too: research shows that child care does not set children back, working mothers benefit their children by being positive role models, many fathers have become more involved in family life, and children of either sex can be raised successfully in single-parent homes or stepfamilies.

Every kind of family, Coontz shows, has strengths that can be fostered and vulnerabilities to be avoided. Stepfamilies, dual-earner couples, single-parent families, and divorced but cooperative parents must function in different ways, but almost every family can be helped to function better. And no family can raise children successfully today without the expansion of economic, cultural, and social support systems that modern parents so desperately need.