The middle-class family and middle-class adolescents in a state of disarray: a social-psychiatric analysis

Because mental health professionals tend to focus their attention on the complex of factors involved in the provision of psychotherapeutic and related services, they often do not give primary attention to the serious instabilities afflicting marriage and family among the middle class and are insufficiently aware of parents' deficiencies in rearing their children well. Moreover, they frequently underestimate the increasing prevalence of character defects and disorders and the acting-out problems they cause among middle-class adolescents and youths, who are widely involved in sexual activity, drug use, and theft and whose educational performance has sharply declined. Using a social-psychiatric perspective, this paper discusses the major sociocultural factors that greatly influence the problems straining and breaking up marriage and family among the middle class. It also examines the reasons for parental inadequacies that contribute heavily to their children's becoming impulse-dominated and involved in self-impairing and socially harmful problems.