Prof James Kelvin

Family Support

Family A:

Adam and Shana have been happily married for 25 years. Adam is a manager at a large chemical company and Shana is a professor at a local community college. Together, they earn about $150,000 per year. They have 3 children, 2 boys and a girl. Their eldest child, Justin, recently finished graduate school with his M.S. in chemical engineering and has a job lined up with Johnson & Johnson. Their middle child, Danielle, is about to graduate college with a B.S. in biology. She plans to live at home for a summer while she decides what she would like to do next. Since her father’s company is always hiring biologists for their lab, she figures she can either go on to graduate school or work for her dad’s company. Their youngest son, Marcus, is currently a college sophomore majoring in architecture. He lives in a dorm during the school year but lives at home during the summer and on breaks.

Family B:

Jessica and Robert were married for 7 years and had 3 children together before getting divorced. They both have had other relationships on and off but are currently single. Jessica is a social worker and earns about $45,000 per year from her job. Robert was laid off a few years ago from his factory job and has been stringing together multiple temporary jobs since then. His income is inconsistent, but he has been earning about $25,000 per year. Jessica and Robert’s children are in their early-to-late twenties. The oldest two, Derrick and Stacy, spent some time at a 4-year college, but dropped out because of the high cost. They are both working low-wage jobs and living at home with their mom to try to save up some money to finish school. Derrick also now has a 2-year old daughter himself that lives with him every weekend. The youngest child in the family, Sarah, recently enrolled in a local community college with the hopes that she can transfer to a 4-year school after a couple years. She is working at the college bookstore to help pay tuition.

Questions:

1. For each of the families above, describe the resources and supports the parents are (likely) providing to their young adult children.

2. For each of the families above, describe the resources and supports the children are (likely) providing to their parents or other family members. It might help to think about the extent to which the parents need support, what types of support they might need (and why), and the extent to which support can be outsourced if it is needed. Your reading should come in handy here.

3. How might the supports you mentioned in Q2 impact young adults’ abilities to fulfill their own goals during the transition to adulthood?

4. Think about the combination of responses from Q1 and Q2. How do you think the future looks for the young adults in Family A and Family B? Where might we expect these different sets of siblings to be 30 years from now?

5. What types of policies might assist low-income families during the transition to adulthood? Feel free to be creative here.