Family trouble : middle-class parents, children's problems, and the disruption of everyday life / Ara Francis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Francis, Ara, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Families.

Middle class families.

Parents of children with disabilities.

Children with disabilities.

Children with social disabilities.

Physical Description:

x, 172 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2015]

Summary:

Our 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 initiate a chain of disruption that move through parents' lives in domino-like fashion, culminating in a crisis characterized by uncertainty, loneliness, guilt, grief, and anxiety. Francis looks at how mothers and fathers often differ in their interpretation of a child's condition, discusses the gendered nature of child rearing, and describes how parents struggle to find effective treatments and to successfully navigate medical and educational bureaucracies. But above all, Family Trouble examines how children's problems disrupt middle-class dreams of the "normal" family. It captures how children's problems "radiate" and spill over into other areas of parents' lives, wreaking havoc even on their identities, leading them to reevaluate deeply held assumptions about their own sense of self and what it means to achieve the good life. Book jacket.

Contents:

Parents in trouble

Constructing trouble, losing certainty

Elusive remedies and disrupted routines

Stigma and disrupted relationships

Unmet expectations and emotional turmoil

Disrupted selves, making sense and making do

Family trouble.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780813570532

0813570530

9780813570525

0813570522

OCLC:

899949624