David Elkind

What has happened to the American family in the last few decades? And what are these changes doing to our children? A renowned child psychologist and author of several influential works on child development, David Elkind has devoted his career to these urgent questions. This eloquent book - the culmination of his inquiry - puts together all the pieces, puzzling facts, and conflicting accounts, and shows us as never before what the American family has become. Today's postmodern family is under enormous stress. And as a result, the needs of hurried children have been sacrificed to the needs of their harried parents. Childhood innocence has been supplanted by the illusion of childhood competence; teenage immaturity has given way to pseudo-sophistication; and parental intuition has been traded in for a mechanical reliance on technique. These changes and a host of others have undermined the well-being of children and adolescents. From Freud to Friedan to Foucault, Elkind traces the roots of the postmodern family back to the failure of the modern nuclear family and its supporting institutions - the media, the so-called helping professions, the legal system, and the schools - to meet the needs of parents. The new postmodern family is more flexible, more permeable, more urbane, but also out of balance because it fails to meet the needs of children. Treated like miniature adults, today's children and adolescents go without the protection and security they need, while their once-sheltered baby-boomer parents, facing new economic pressures for which they are unprepared, secretly wonder why they've never really felt like grown-ups. But all is not bleak. Elkind finds evidence of an emerging vital family that melds the best of the modern and postmodern, one in which the needs of all family members are held in a dynamic, if delicate, balance. Many books have decried the decline in family values, the negative impact of divorce, the increase in single-mother families, and impoverished prospects for our children. But none has pulled all these fragments together as Elkind's does and put them into a solid framework, one that finally makes sense of the way we were, and what we as families may become.

v, 135 p. ; 23 cm

All Grown Up and No Place to Go spotlights the pressures on teenagers to grow up quickly. The resulting problems range from common alienation to self-destructive behavior. Quoting teenagers themselves, Elkind shows why adolescence is a time of "thinking in a new key," and how young people need this time to get used to the social and emotional changes their new thinking brings. Many of his ideas, such as the "imaginary audience" that makes teens so self-conscious, have become seminal in adolescent psychology. In this thoroughly revised edition, Elkind also explores the "post-modern family" in which teenagers are growing up. He helps parents and those who work with youth understand teens in crucial ways, because the root of so many adolescent frictions is the gap between what teenagers need and what our culture provides.

"Dr. Elkind has shown that in blurring the boundaries of what is age appropriate, by expecting - or imposing - too much too soon, we force our kids to grow up too fast, to mimic adult sophistication while secretly yearning for innocence.". "In the two decades since this book first appeared, we have compounded the problem, inadvertently stepping up the assault on childhood in the media, in schools, and at home. Taking a detailed, up-to-the-minute look at the Internet, classroom culture, school violence, movies, television, and a growing societal incivility, Dr. Elkind here shows us where hurrying occurs today and why. And as before, he offers parents and teachers alike insights, advice, and hope for encouraging healthy development while protecting the joy and freedom of childhood."--BOOK JACKET.

xii, 728 p. : 25 cm

Nine essays examine the theories, thought, work, and discoveries of the Swiss psychologist.