ABSTRACT
Employment plays an important role in parents’ lives and serves as a model for teens’ growing sense of identity. Occupational status is linked with social values such as worth, responsibility, maturity, and success, as well as material gain through salary and employment benefits. This chapter focuses on the social context of adolescent family transitions as they relate to work by describing views of maternal and paternal employment and how work impacts the family. It describes the teens’ experiences with work and parents’ feelings about their children entering into this new social milieu. Most of the literature addressing the job-related stressors experienced by families focuses on the strain experienced by the competing demands of wage work and family caregiving. Work patterns have long-lasting implications for family life.
