Literature for Young People draws attention to the age of recipients and suggests the need to consider the limitations and potentials in the selection of topics, artistic complications and linguistic structures. Here, we focus on the border of books for middle grade (8–13 years) and young adults (13–18 years) allowing us to look at the literary images of maturation that is shown at the background of the family. Polish novels from the Young Adult (YA) stream created at the turn of the century reflect the changes that have occurred in the social structure of the family since 1989. The crisis of the family is a result of moral and cultural transformation. The full family, the incomplete one, and the patchwork family fail at a time when the teenage character faces the process of growing up, at the time of illness or death of a beloved one, when they face their own disability, start their sex life, experience early motherhood or experiment with drugs. Novels about the crises in the life of teenage characters reveal a crisis of motherhood and fatherhood. Fathers are usually excluded from the family landscape. Mothers, instead of raising their teenage children, try to control them. Home rules are to obey the rigor enforced by psychological pressure and screaming. Verbal aggression and humiliation become a source of emotional bereavement of a young character. Family in each of the presented models is an institution devoid of repair mechanisms. Under the influence of the difficult experience there is no re-evaluation of existing structures and their organization, dependence, relations. The literary portraits of families reveal a structural, cultural and emotional stereotype which does not provide positive examples and leaves no doubt about durability of ties binding the family members. Also writings reveal the crisis of writing about family in YA literature, because the presented works lack ways to overcome cultural stereotypes and they portray the crisis instead pointing directions to which the modern family transforms to.