African families face serious crises today. They are under economic, demographic and political pressures of all kinds; yet, families are not mere hapless victims of global change. They are proactive, resilient agents and creators of change. This volume studies global and national transformation from the point of view of families in local communities. Contributors are from Africa, North America, and Europe, and provide socially and historically based, culturally rich, multigenerational, and comparative perspectives on family life in Africa today. The essays explore contemporary change in African families, and consequences for children and parents, the elderly, gender roles, moral values, fertility, health (HIV and nutrition), and economic development. Ultimately, despite desperate economic, sociohistorical, demographic and political circumstances, African families remain vitally important for social and psychological support throughout an individual's life span.

Low-skilled women in the 1990s took widely different paths in trying to support their children. Some held good jobs with growth potential, some cycled in and out of low-paying jobs, some worked part time, and others stayed out of the labor force entirely. Scholars have closely analyzed the economic consequences of these varied trajectories, but little research has focused on the consequences of a mother s career path on her children s development.Making It Work, edited by Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Thomas Weisner, and Edward Lowe, looks past the economic statistics to illustrate how different employment trajectories affect the social and emotional lives of poor women and their children. Making It Work examines Milwaukee s New Hope program, an experiment testing the effectiveness of an anti-poverty initiative that provided health and child care subsidies, wage supplements, and other services to full-time low-wage workers. Employing parent surveys, teacher reports, child assessment measures, ethnographic studies, and state administrative records, Making It Work provides a detailed picture of how a mother s work trajectory affects her, her family, and her children s school performance, social behavior, and expectations for the future. Rashmita Mistry and Edward D. Lowe find that increases in a mother s income were linked to higher school performance in her children. Without large financial worries, mothers gained extra confidence in their ability to parent, which translated into better test scores and higher teacher appraisals for their children. JoAnn Hsueh finds that the children of women with erratic work schedules and non-standard hours conditions endemic to the low-skilled labor market exhibited higher levels of anxiety and depression. Conversely, Noemi Enchautegui-de-Jesus, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, and Vonnie McLoyd discover that better job quality predicted lower levels of acting-out and withdrawal among children. Perhaps most surprisingly, Anna Gassman-Pines, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, and Sandra Nay note that as wages for these workers rose, so did their marriage rates, suggesting that those worried about family values should also be concerned with alleviating poverty in America."