"How Families Still Matter casts doubt on much conventional wisdom about family decline during the last decades of the twentieth century. The authors draw from one of the longest-running longitudinal studies of families in the world - the Longitudinal Study of Generations, conducted at the University of Southern California - to discover whether parents are really less critical in shaping the life orientations and achievements of youth than they were a generation ago. Using survey data collected from as early as 1971, they compare the influence of parents (on self-confidence, values, and levels of achievement) on the Baby Boomer generation with that of Baby Boomer parents on their own Generation X children. The findings will be surprising to many readers."--Jacket.