Description
Book SynopsisOur children mean the world to us. They are so central to our hopes and dreams that we will do almost anything to keep them healthy, happy, and safe. What happens, then, when a child has serious problems? In Family Trouble, a compelling portrait of upheaval in family life, sociologist Ara Francis tells the stories of middle-class men and women whose children face significant medical, psychological, and social challenges. Francis interviewed the mothers and fathers of children with such problems as depression, bi-polar disorder, autism, learning disabilities, drug addiction, alcoholism, fetal alcohol syndrome, and cerebral palsy. Children's problems, she finds, profoundly upset the foundations of parents' everyday lives, overturning taken-for-granted expectations, daily routines, and personal relationships. Indeed, these problems initiated a chain of disruption that moved through parents' lives in domino-like fashion, culminating in a crisis characterized by uncertainty, loneliness, gu
Trade Review“This smart, engaging book demonstrates the complicated nature of parenthood - a salient identity for most adults in the United States today. Especially impressive is Francis’s ability to weave through multiple sociological constructs and subfields, including medicalization, stigma, identity, emotion work, gender, and disability.” * American Journal of Sociology *
"An exquisite and magnificent piece of sociological scholarship,
Family Trouble is clear, interesting, and highly engaging. Francis’s study and analysis are rich and nuanced as she covers the many dimensions of the phenomenon she calls 'family trouble.'" -- Eviatar Zerubavel * author of Hidden in Plain Sight as well as Ancestors and Relatives *
"Family Trouble offers rich, empirically based insights into the everyday, relational and emotional processes that mark the distinctive forms of 'concerted cultivation' pursued by contemporary middle-class American families with 'problemed' children." -- Robert M. Emerson * professor emeritus of sociology at UCLA *
Table of ContentsPreface
1 Parents in Trouble
2 Constructing Trouble, Losing Certainty
3 Elusive Remedies and Disrupted Routines
4 Stigma and Disrupted Relationships
5 Unmet Expectations and Emotional Turmoil
6 Disrupted Selves, Making Sense and Making Do
7 Family Trouble
Appendix A
Appendix B
Bibliography
Index
