Families: Developing Relationships

by Mollie Stevens Smart

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• Format: Hardcover
• ISBN: B001I4QS3A
• Release Date: January 1976
• Publisher: Macmillian Publishing Co., Inc.

Customer Reviews

I worked on this book

I personally shot some of the photographs, drew and rerendered some of the various charts and graphs, and proof read this book. You could have checked that with MacMillan Publishers payroll department, before the current HIPAA laws went into effect, but I'm sure that author Laura Smart, Ph.D., would vouch for the validity of my involvement. At the time that "Families" was published in the USA, it was creative, from a sociological perspective. I think that in some respects this book popularized the idea of comparing our culture with others, even more than did Margaret Mead's work. Now, about thirty-five years after its publication, my opinion about the book "Families" is that it presented a more personally challenging look at the topic, at least for US citizens, than did Mead's observational and descriptive works. I think that, in a time of great social unrest, "Families" touched a collegiate generation at the heart, whereas Mead's work had given us a more detailed voyeuristic mental look at what other societies were like. For many readers, at the end of the US involvement in Viet Nam, before President Bill Clinton popularized the internet, before publically accessible email, before Facebook and Google, the book "Families" was an eye-opening and potentially shocking challenge for US collegians, provoking the question of choice about whether we personally cared to continue to live in a family, as we had grown up to know what that meant, as opposed to how other cultures viewed how people are related to one another, what people consider to be family units, and what the criteria were for considering one to be a part of a given family. Although I now disagree with the relatively amoral tone of some of the discussions, I must admit that the authors, Mollie Smart and Laura Smart, definitely made their mark, during that era in US collegiate history.