Why can’t we get this parenting thing right? You’d think there was something hard about it. Into the fray jumps Robert Shaw, a psychotherapist and director of the Family Institute of Berkeley, Calif., with “The Epidemic: The Rot of American Culture, Absentee and Permissive Parenting, and the Resultant Plague of Joyless, Selfish Children” (ReganBooks, $24.95).
The title tells you pretty much where he stands. Kids today, he writes, are being reared in a toxic environment of media saturation and consumerism, with parents having abandoned their responsibilities as teachers and guides. Young people aren’t learning the value of honesty and effort, he writes, or how to love. He traces the epidemic of “uncommunicative, learning-impared and uncontrollable children” to parenting trends of the last 30 years, with their emphasis on “creating an atmosphere that feels satisfactory to the child all the time.”
He offers suggestions on how to reverse these trends and delivers them reasonably and persuasively, with the passion of a man who has seen it all and can’t take it anymore.
On an early start: “Eight-month-olds don’t require a meal every two hours . . . and to continue to slavishly feed an older infant every time he whimpers is a mistake.”
