Join Ronald J. Comer (Princeton University) and Jonathan S. Comer (Florida International University), the renowned best-selling authors of Abnormal Psychology and Fundamentals of Abnormal Psychology, as they review the rapidly growing body of research on how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the state of mental health and its treatment.     WATCH RECORDING ... View more

APA has a new Introductory Psychology Initiative that provides recommendations for teaching the intro psych course, training teachers, and assessing student learning. In this webinar, Jane Halonen (University of West Florida) will discuss the Initiative's recommendations regarding student learning outcomes and assessment strategies to improve the quality of the introductory psychology experience.     WATCH RECORDING ... View more

David Myers (Hope College), longtime author of our bestselling introductory psychology resources, offers his insights on the human element of this crisis—our need to belong, why we may be too much, or too little, afraid, and how shared threats affect social behavior.     WATCH RECORDING ... View more

Join us for the Macmillan's Psychology Speaker Series!  At Macmillan Learning, our psychology community includes committed teachers, researchers, and authors. Among them are some exceptionally compelling advocates for how psychological science can help us understand our contemporary lives. Join us for this timely, idea-rich series of talks from some of the most effective voices in psychology education today, as they share their thoughts on teaching, learning, and living in these unsettling times. You can register for one or all of the following webinars: October 8 - Human Behavior Amidst the COVID Crisis: Helping and Hurting? with David Myers - 1:00 PM EST: VIEW THE RECORDING David Myers (Hope College), longtime author of our bestselling intro psych resources, offers his insights on the human element of this crisis--our need to belong, why we may be too much, or too little, afraid, and how shared threats affect social behavior. October 21 - The APA Introductory Psychology Initiative Outcomes: What You Need to Know with Jane Halonen- 1:00 PM EST: VIEW THE RECORDING APA has a new Introductory Psychology Initiative that provides recommendations for teaching the intro psych course, training teachers, and assessing student learning. In this webinar, Jane Halonen (University of West Florida) will discuss the Initiative's recommendations regarding student learning outcomes and assessment strategies to improve the quality of the introductory psychology experience. November 5 - Abnormal Psychology in the Era of COVID-19 with Ron & Jon Comer- 1:00 PM EST Join Ronald J. Comer (Princeton University) and Jonathan S. Comer (Florida International University), the renowned best-selling authors of Abnormal Psychology and Fundamentals of Abnormal Psychology, as they review the rapidly growing body of research on how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the state of mental health and its treatment. November 12 - Making a Smooth Transition to Online Assessment with Scott Cohn- 1:00 PM EST Looking for simple solutions? Professor Scott Cohn (Western Colorado University) will demonstrate tips and techniques for creating a positive online assessment experience for students. Resource options will be compared with specific examples from his Introductory Psychology course. November 19 - A Hidden Strength in the Psychology Classroom with Debra Roberts - 2:00 PM EST Debra Roberts (Howard University), lead supplements author of My Psychology, draws on her years of teaching and research to share strategies for talking about diversity in psychology classes.   Register today to save your seat! REGISTER HERE *NOTE: You must follow this link to register.  ... View more

From the AARP to politicians to the health care industry to the popular media, there is a lot of concern over the challenges that the U.S. faces taking care of an aging population and the toll it might take on individual Americans to care for their aging parents.  These concerns are amplified by the fact that, unlike many other developed countries, the U.S. does not have a strong safety net to help with elder care.  An added complication is the new reality that many Americans taking care of aging parents are also raising their own children at the same time—a phenomenon often referred to as being in the sandwich generation.     As with many issues in a family studies course, this one has recently shifted from the professional realm to the personal realm for me when my own parents started having significant health problems right as my kids entered some very trying years of adolescence.  So, count me as a member of the sandwich generation.  That personal perspective helped to fine-tune my professional expertise on family processes and how what goes on within our intimate family lives offers us a way to think about the larger society and our place in it.  That is one of the core perspectives of Families Now, reminding us to think about our families as something that develops in fits and starts over long periods of time within contexts—large and small—that shape us from the outside in.  For example, multiple chapters (e.g., 6, 13, 15) in Families Now offer concrete ways to place our own experiences in such a context:  More people are caught in the “sandwich” in families because of a demographic crunch in society, one created by longer life expectancy (more aging parents to care for indefinitely), a declining birth rate (fewer kids to share responsibilities for any one aging parent), and delayed age at birth (more years in which there are kids at home while parents need care).   The historical economic and political marginalization of families of color in our society meant that, over time, they built stronger family and community networks of extended kin and non-kin to help people deal with the challenges of caring for aging parents (and raising children), so that social resources developed to deal with a dearth of other kinds of resources. The challenges of caring for aging parents has ripple effects across families and communities, as relationships between adult siblings can fracture in conflict and the strain on adult children can trickle down into their interactions with their own children. To build on this discussion, have your students estimate their chances of spending significant time in the sandwich generation based on their parents’ ages and different ages at which they want to become parents (if they do).  You can even have them factor in their siblings’ situations to figure out how much of that time will be shared.  Upon comparing different potential future experiences of the sandwich generation, you can lead a discussion of the ways that the government or community-based groups could help people—including, possibly, their future selves—with the challenges of caring for aging parents.   ... View more

Helicopter parent is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot these days, rarely as a compliment.  It refers to the idea that modern parents hover over their children, vigilantly paying attention and ready to swoop in to take control at the first sign of trouble.  I see them all the time, not just in my research on families but in my own life as a parent who likes to see himself as not helicopter parenting, but, really, does any helicopter parent think they are helicoptering?  The point is that many American parents have become—or are thought to have become—overly involved in managing their children’s lives.   As a sociologist who studies child development with a focus on parenting, I unpack, contextualize, and complicate widely discussed ideas like helicopter parenting in Families Now.  In fact, I would argue that using parenting—and all the messy interactions and conflicted feelings it entails—as a window into the state of the family and the country is precisely what makes Families Now unique and necessary.  I think that helicopter parenting—any kind of parenting, really—is so much more than what goes on between parent and child.  For example, sections of Chapters 11, 12, and 13 of Families Now delve into the modern phenomenon of overly involved parents to connect such a personal experience to three macro-level forces:  The growing economic uncertainty of life in a globalized world, which motivates anxious parents to increasingly attempt to exert control over the children’s lives to ensure (in their minds) that they will be OK. The widening socioeconomic and racial/ethnic inequality that results in helicopter-type parenting working very well for families who already have power and status—helping their already advantaged children gain more advantages in schools and elsewhere—while being far harder to achieve and less likely to have the same impact for other families.  The convergence of the cultural evolution in the perceived starting point of adulthood and the insecurity of the modern labor market that increases the length of time that young people are dependent on their parents, which means that helicopter parenting is happening far past childhood and well into the 20s and 30s (and maybe even beyond!).   To continue this discussion, pose two scenarios to your students: 1) a sports team suspends a high-performing 13-year old for speaking disrespectfully to officials, and 2) a 22-year old does well on tests in a college math course but is given a low grade because of poor attendance.  Now, break the students into smaller discussion groups and pose the following questions: What are concrete examples of parental reactions to these situations that you would characterize as helicopter parenting? Can you articulate where the “line” is between helicopter and non-helicopter reactions? Does changing the identity of the young person in question from male to female, black to white, or low-income to high-income change how you think that parents would react or how “successful” their reactions would be in terms of serving their children’s interests? Bring the class together to determine where the consensus and disagreements arise, also providing opportunities for willing students to reflect on where their own parents fall in the spectrum of helicopter (or non-helicopter) parenting. ... View more

When people find out about the family research that I conduct as a social scientist, they often look at me quizzically and ask “that’s nice, but how useful is it?”  To them, advancing understanding of how families work seems less than important if that research is not directly leading to explicit plans of actions to help or change families in some way.  I do not agree with that sentiment, but I get where it is coming from to some extent.  There is the need to point out and explain social problems and the need to remedy such problems, and it certainly seems efficient if those two things are part of the same enterprise even if they do not have to be.  Yet, efforts to change families—even those that are grounded in sound research—often do not have any impact.  Partly, that is because families—like people—are hard to change.   One thing that is clear to me after many years in this line of work is that improving this less than ideal record of impact requires that we come together to construct beyond multifaceted approaches to problems facing families.  One theme of Families Now is that the core element of a multifaceted approach is that it links macro and micro levels of understanding of some problem or challenge. With such a macro-micro linkage, we can connect family policies to family interventions.  The former concern broad-scale efforts to shift the population of families in some intended direction, such as the federal welfare reform legislation discussed in Chapter 4 that was intended to increase employment rates in the population of low-income mothers and reduce the number of families on public assistance in the process.  The latter are targeted efforts to shift dynamics within families in some intended direction, such as community-based programs discussed in Chapter 15 to help improve the climate of relationships in families with children with chronic illnesses by providing emotional supports to those children’s siblings.  Surveying so many different policies and interventions collectively across the chapters in Families Now suggests to me—and I hope to your students—that family policy and intervention need to partner up.  Consider the discussion of some major government-funded programs in Families Now: An effort to increase the quality and health of marriages among low-income couples by improving their communication and interactions had disappointing results, and one criticism of this program was that it focused too much on what was going on between spouses and not enough on the outside external pressures (e.g., economic instability) on them.  An effort to improve the academic and health outcomes of young people from low-income families by moving them in large numbers to more affluent communities with greater economic opportunities did not consistently yield its intended benefits, and one criticism of this program was that it focused too much on the residential distribution of families across communities and not enough on the interpersonal dynamics (such as peer relations) that young people faced upon moving. In one case, a lot of money went towards something too micro, and, in another, it went towards something too macro.  Is there some meeting point? To delve deeper into these issues, pose the following challenge to your students.  The goal is to reduce the rate of child maltreatment (i.e., abuse or neglect) in families, and your state creates a blue-ribbon family to propose actions to achieve this goal.  Separate the students into groups representing different blue ribbon panels, and ask each group to sketch out one general plan to address this problem.  After the groups present their proposed plans to the class, lead a discussion of how much they lean towards the policy and intervention side and how they could balance these two approaches. ... View more

Across the various socioeconomic and racial/ethnic groups within our diverse population, there are more similarities in how people think about families and engage in family life than there are differences.  That does not mean that there are no differences.  On average, one group may look slightly or even significantly different from another, and, rather than obscure that variability, we should dive into it to figure out what it means.  As anybody who has taught a family class (or, watched the news really) knows, however, the identification of difference often leads to assumptions of deficit.  In other words, there is a tendency—even among the well-meaning—to think about a single standard of family behavior and judge families who do not adhere to that standard as deviant.  That widespread tendency makes having important conversations that much more difficult, which makes progress that much harder to come by.    One thing that my training has given me is a constant voice in my head asking “what about history?” and “what about inequality?”  That perspective forces me to try to understand something happening right now in some family or group of families and go backwards in time to capture the historical trend getting us to this point and go up in terms of levels of society to capture the stratification of our society and how it trickles down into our family lives.  This perspective is woven through all chapters in Families Now, and I think it is especially helpful in understanding many instances of socioeconomic and racial/ethnic differences in family life—thinking historically rather than simply contemporaneously, thinking macro instead of solely micro.  As a result, we can “cancel” deficit model and instead think of such differences in terms of the ways that the families adapt to their own unique sets of needs and challenges within their specific environments. To share some examples from Chapters 8, 11, and 12 from Families Now: Social scientists now tend to discuss the significantly higher likelihood that low-income parents will have children when unmarried (vs. married) in terms of economics rather than morals.  They highlight how historical changes in the economy (e.g., rising inequality, declining job stability) have led economically vulnerable parents—much more than their economically stable counterparts—to view marriage as an insecure and unpredictable setting for having children. Qualitative studies have problematized the narrative around the relatively low rate of breastfeeding among African-American women over the last half-century, shifting the discussion from questions about good and bad maternal choices to highlight how they actively resist the too-narrow definitions of what it means to be a good mother that are imposed on them by the larger society. U.S. schools increasingly expect parents to be visibly involved in school activities, so the lower-than-average engagement of Latino/a parents was often interpreted by school personnel (and researchers) that they cared less about their children’s education than other parents.  More culturally informed research has revealed that such interpretations ignore the barriers that schools erect to Latino/a parents’ involvement but also the many ways that they support their children’s education that school personnel (and researchers) do not see.   To keep going with this discussion, present to your class the specific example, discussed in Chapters 2 and 8, in which the rate of fertility and extended family structures among Mexican immigrants in the U.S. is higher compared to the general U.S. population. Ask the students to explain this difference—why would Mexican immigrants have more children and more often live with other kin than, say, White non-immigrants in the U.S.? Remind students that the rates of fertility and extended family structures among Mexican immigrants in the U.S. is also higher than Mexicans in Mexico—what does that say about the use of any cultural explanations for the family behaviors of Mexican immigrants? If using both comparison points allows non-cultural explanations to emerge, what are those other kinds of explanations?  Does the idea of adaptation to the environment factor into these explanations? ... View more

From a source you know you can trust on COVID-19-- the world's foremost scientific magazine Our sister company, Scientific American, has brought together and made available dozens of articles on the coronavirus outbreak that we can share with you. It's an extraordinary resource on what the virus actually is, how it affects us, how it became a pandemic, what we can do to fight it, and how it will change us going into the future. View the articles on Scientific American. ... View more