The Parental Experience In Midlife (The John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series On Mental Health And Development, Studies On Successful Midlife Development)

The Parental Experience in Midlife (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Mental Health and Development, Studies on Successful Midlife Development)

About the Author Carol D. Ryff is professor of psychology and director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Most adults experience parenthood. But the longest period of the parental experience-when children grow into adolescence and young adulthood and parents themselves are not yet elderly-is the least understood. In this groundbreaking volume, distinguished scholars from anthropology, demography, economics, psychology, social work, and sociology explore the uncharted years of midlife parenthood. The authors employ a rich array of theory and methods to address how the parental experience affects the health, well-being, and development of individuals. Collectively, they look at the time when parents watch offspring grow into adulthood and begin to establish adult-to-adult relationships with their children. With a strong emphasis on the diversity of midlife parenting, including sociodemographic variations and specific parent or child characteristics such as single parenting or raising a child with a disability, this volume presents for the first time the complex factors that influence the quality of the midlife parenting experience. From Library Journal Ryff, director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Seltzer (social work, Univ. of Wisconsin), who is affiliated with the Waisman Center, have brought together several disparate studies on midlife parenting. Their main goal is to highlight research on how children affect the lives of their parents instead of the more traditional research emphasis of finding out how parents affect their children. Researchers included here met this challenge in various ways. For example, "midlife parenting" was defined several different ways, usually according to the age of the parents or of their children. Some of the studies also focused on different subgroups, such as African American or Latino parents, single fathers, and parents with disabled children living at home. Because of these varying focuses and because some studies still seem to highlight the children of the middle-aged parents, this book doesn't hang together as well as one might hope. But most academic libraries that support psychology and/or sociology programs should buy it because it includes many studies that can be utilized by researchers.?Pamela A. Matthews, Missouri Western State Coll. Lib., St. JosephCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From the Back Cover In this groundbreaking volume, distinguished scholars in anthropology, demography, economics, psychology, social work, and sociology explore the uncharted years of midlife parenthood. The authors employ a rich array of theory and methods to address how parental experience affects the health, well-being, and development of parents. Collectively, they look at the time when parents watch their children grow into adulthood and begin to establish adult-to-adult relationships with children. With a strong emphasis on the diversity of midlife parenting, including sociodemographic variations and specific parent or child characteristics such as single parenting or raising a child with a disability, this volume presents for the first time the complex factors that influence the quality of the midlife parenting experience.