Furstenberg, Frank F

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  • Publication
    Grandparents & Family Crisis
    (1986) Cherlin, Andrew; Furstenberg, Frank F
    When family crisis occurs, are grandparents part of the solution or part of the problem? Both possibilities have been advanced in a spate of recent books and articles about intergenerational relations. Some authors have urged grandparents to take a more active role inn helping to solve the family's problems, while others have called for legislation to help ease the effects on grandparents of crises such as divorce. However, a national study of grandparents that we recently completed, to be published by Basic Books this September (Cherlin and Furstenberg, 1986), suggests that most grandparents are unlikely to become either the saviors of the family of the helpless victims of family disruption. Our study consisted of interviews conducted in 1983 with the grandparents of a nationally representative sample of children who had been interviewed previously in 1976 and 1981, yielding a unique, three-generational national survey. The study indicated that grandparents play a limited but important role in family dynamics. This role prevents them from becoming major forces in their grandchildren's lives, but it also provides them with ways of avoiding some of the severe shocks of family crisis.
  • Publication
    Middle-Income Families in the Economic Downturn: Challenges and Management Strategies over Time
    (2011-10-01) Iversen, Roberta R; Napolitano, Laura; Furstenberg, Frank F
    The “Great Recession” has hurt many families across the United States, yet most research has examined its impact on those already considered poor or working poor. However, this recession has affected middle-income families, whose experiences with economic challenge have seldom been looked at in any detail. Such families have recently been called “the new poor,” “the missing middle,” and “families in the middle.” One in seven American children under age 18 (10.5 million) has an unemployed parent as a result of this recession, and because economic mobility for children in the U.S. is affected by their parents’ earning capacities, these children’s educational and employment futures may be permanently constrained. The research presented here, which is informed by Weberian stratification theory and capital theories, is based on a small longitudinal subset of a larger two-country, multicity, mixed-methods study. Two waves of in-person interviews between spring 2008 and late fall 2009 revealed how families experienced the economic downturn and the management strategies that parents used to try to counter its negative effects. Parents were better able to provide financially for their children’s daily needs and support children’s current school activities, despite income and job challenges and losses, but less able to continue to develop children’s future-enhancing capital.
  • Publication
    Dealing With Dads: The Changing Roles of Fathers
    (1995) Furstenberg, Frank F
    One of the first lessons taught in sociology in the 1960s was that marriage was a universal or nearly universal institution. A cultural mechanism for regulating the potentially conflicting claims and obligations of parenthood, marriage simultaneously grants paternity rights to fathers and their families while ensuring social recognition and economic support for childbearers and their offspring. Marriage provides an added benefit for children by connecting them to a wider network of adults who have a stake in their long-term development (Malinowski, 1930; Davis, 1939).
  • Publication
    One Hundred Years of Change in the American Family
    (1987) Furstenberg, Frank F
  • Publication
  • Publication
    Family Change in Global Perspective: How and Why Family Systems Change
    (2019-03-25) Furstenberg, Frank F.
    Changes in family systems that have occurred over the past half century throughout the Western world are now spreading across the globe to nations that are experiencing economic development, technological change, and shifts in cultural beliefs. Traditional family systems are adapting in different ways to a series of conditions that forced shifts in all Western nations. In this paper, I examine the causes and consequences of global family change, introducing a recently funded project using the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and U.S. Census Bureau data to chart the pace and pattern of changes in marriage and family systems in low- and middle-income nations.
  • Publication
    On a New Schedule: Transitions to Adulthood and Family Change
    (2010-04-01) Furstenberg, Frank F
    Summary Frank Furstenberg examines how the newly extended timetable for entering adulthood is affecting, and being affected by, the institution of the Western, particularly the American, family. He reviews a growing body of research on the family life of young adults and their parents and draws out important policy implications of the new schedule for the passage to adulthood. Today, says Furstenberg, home-leaving, marriage, and the onset of childbearing take place much later in the life span than they did during the period after World War II. After the disappearance of America s well-paying unskilled and semi-skilled manufacturing jobs during the 1960s, youth from all economic strata began remaining in school longer and marrying and starting their own families later. Increasing numbers of lower-income women did not marry at all but chose, instead, non-marital parenthood?often turning to their natal families for economic and social support, rather than to their partners. As the period of young adults' dependence on their families grew longer, the financial and emotional burden of parenthood grew heavier. Today, regardless of their income level, U.S. parents provide roughly the same proportion of their earnings to support their young adult children. Unlike many nations in Europe, the United States, with its relatively underdeveloped welfare system, does not invest heavily in education, health care, and job benefits for young adults. It relies, instead, on families' investments in their own adult children. But as the transition to adulthood becomes more protracted, the increasing family burden may prove costly to society as a whole. Young adults themselves may begin to regard childbearing as more onerous and less rewarding. The need to provide greater support for children for longer periods may discourage couples from having additional children or having children at all. Such decisions could lead to lower total fertility, ultimately reduce the workforce, and further aggravate the problem of providing both for increasing numbers of the elderly and for the young. U.S. policy makers must realize the importance of reinforcing the family nest and helping reduce the large and competing demands that are being placed on today's parents.
  • Publication
    Strategies of Evaluating Police Performance
    (1972) Furstenberg, Frank F
    Police in this country have never been immune from public criticism. But during the past decade negative reaction has increased markedly, both in intensity and in frequency of expression. Chronic grievances—corruption, strained relations with minority groups, ineffectualness in combating crime—have resurfaced (some would say they were never submerged), and new concerns over the growth of unions and politicization of police forces have arisen. While the police still enjoy a great deal of popular support, there are indications that, at least in certain segments of the population, a reevaluation of their image may be taking place.
  • Publication
    Bringing in the Family: Kinship Support and Contraceptive Behavior
    (1981) Furstenberg, Frank F; Herceg-Baron, Roberta; Jemail, Jay
    Though social programs are usually based on a presumption of empirical knowledge, it is no secret that research typically follows, rather than precedes efforts at social intervention. More often than not, social scientists are called in to assess the impact of an existing programmatic initiative, and are asked to render a judgment about the wisdom of a particular course of action after the fact. Only rarely do they take an active part in planning the experiments that they evaluate.
  • Publication
    Coming of Age in a Changing Family System
    (1990) Furstenberg, Frank F
    The assumption that adolescent experience is shaped in important ways by family experience is widely embraced by developmentalists. While researchers appreciate the family's powerful impact on children's success in negotiating the period of adolescence, how that passage is linked to specific features of family structure and dynamics has not been adequately studied. Complicating the examination of this process are the profound changes that have been occurring in the family over the past several decades.