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 book - the culmination of his inquiry - puts together all the pieces, puzzling facts, and conflicting accounts, and demonstrates 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 Childhood innocence has been superseded by the illusion of childhood competence; teenage immaturity has given way to pseudo-sophistication, and parental intuition has been traded in for a mechanical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 bolstering 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 - and vulnerable. Having thrown off the modern myths of romance, maternal love, and domestic bliss, the American family is finding its postmodern substitutes wanting. Treated like miniature adults, today's children and adolescents go without the protection and security they need, while their once-sheltered babyboomer parents secretly wonder why they've never really felt like grown-ups. However, Elkind finds evidence of an emerging vital family that combines the best of modern and postmodern, a family in which the needs of "all" members are understood and held in a dynamic, if delicate, balance.