Each semester, these books are used in approximately 8,000 college courses across the country and read by hundreds of thousands of college students who are likely to view them as authoritative. The college instructors who are training the next generation of counselors, nurses, therapists, social workers, and teachers often rely on precisely these books for their own understanding of the scientific consensus on family matters. Family textbooks display remarkably little interest in the effects of marital disruption or single parenting on children, devoting an average of only 3.5 pages to this topic. Just 24 of 338 total chapters in these textbooks deal with family effects on children. Three times as much space is devoted to adult relations, without regard to how they affect children.
Current textbooks convey a pessimistic view of view of marriage.
These books repeatedly suggest that marriage is more a problem than a solution. The potential costs of marriage to adults receive exaggerated treatment, while the benefits of marriage, both to individuals and society, are downplayed. Current textbooks are riddled with glaring errors, distortions of research, omissions of important data, and misattributions of scholarship. Of the books examined, the two worst are Contemporary Families and Relationships, by John Scanzoni, and Changing Families, by Judy Aulette. The best is Public and Private Families, by Andrew Cherlin.