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Product Description
Children grow up too fast today!” This complaint, often tinged with a sense of bewilderment and helplessness, is heard with increasing frequency among parents today. Indeed, even the preteen tweens” are sophisticated beyond their years, experiencing, sexual and emotional aspects of life heretofore considered adult” and facing emotional and material overload that in the relatively recent past would have daunted people twice their age. In Ready or Not, Kay Hymowitz offers a startling look at the forces in the popular culture that bombard our children today. In particular she shows how experts” urging us to treat children as small adults” have affected our ideas about childhood. The most pernicious effect of this new development, she believes, is that the independence and other trappings of maturity that children are given (rather than earning) at an early age makes them paradoxically less able to negotiate the passage to adulthood than their predecessors in an earlier, more protective time.
Amazon.com Review
The kids aren't alright, says Kay S. Hymowitz: Americans are doing a lousy job of raising their children. The next generation isn't being socialized properly, she elaborates, and the result is a country full of sexually active youngsters and exploding juvenile crime rates. "Until the middle of the twentieth century, it was considered an obvious fact that children are prone to cruelty, aggression, and boundless egotism and that a major purpose of their upbringing is to restrain and redirect those impulses," writes Hymowitz, a mother of three. Today, however, so-called experts have advanced "the idea that children are autonomous, independent individuals discovering their own reality." Perhaps this is natural in a country that values individualism, she says, but that doesn't mean adults--parents, teachers, and neighbors--should abandon their traditional roles as authority figures and moral guides. "The truth is, children are ignorant," says Hymowitz; they need adults to help them grow up. Ready or Not emphasizes the problem at the expense of suggesting solutions, but perhaps this is appropriate. There is a real freshness in the author's argument that won't be found elsewhere, but after reading her book, many will wonder how we could have missed the truth for so long. --John J. Miller
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