ABSTRACT
It is in sociological terms that this chapter attempts to frame and solve the sole questions with which it deals, namely: Why does contemporary western civilization manifest an extraordinary amount of parent-adolescent conflict? Though one's attention, in explaining the parent-youth relations of a given milieu, is focused on the variables, one cannot comprehend the action of the variables without also understanding the constants, the latter constitute the structural and functional basis of the family as a part of society. The first important variable is the rate of social change. Extremely rapid change in modern civilization, in contrast to most societies, tends to increase parent-youth conflict, for within a fast-changing social order the time-interval between generations, become historically significant, thereby creating a hiatus between generations. Rapid social change would have no power to produce conflict were it not for two universal factors: first, the family's duration; and second, the decelerating rate of socialization in the development of personality.
