"Family Portraits in Changing Times profiles a cross section of families that reflect the significant changes taking place in the United States. Individuals tell their own unique stories, illustrating the ways in which families grow, disintegrate, regroup, and transform over time. Individual families, like the individual humans who compose them, are always in flux." "The families in this book represent a variety of interpersonal, interdependent relationships, including households in which the parents and/or children may be multiracial, multigenerational, divorced, single, step-family, physically disabled, adopted, gay, or lesbian. Seven of the families were first photographed in the 1970s and rephotographed more than a decade later, offering a striking visual comparison of the considerable changes a family experiences over the years." "What had been regarded as the nontraditional family in the 1980s simply because of its composition has been supplemented by change not only in composition but also in ways of functioning and role definition within the family. With less than 15 percent of households in the U.S. comprised of the traditional breadwinner father, homemaker mother, and their two birth children, today's nontraditional families have become the mainstream. Judith Stacey, a sociology professor and family scholar who wrote the foreword to this book, calls this the "post-modern family." The photographs and personal stories in Family Portraits in Changing Times offer insights and greater understanding into the constellation of new families in the U.S."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved