Books in Brief

The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family, by Dana Mack (Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., $25)

ACROSS the country, across lines of race, class, and sex, hundreds of parents told Dana Mack the same thing: I just want them to leave me alone. “Them” would be the multitude of forces that beguile, direct, or captivate children, and make a parent’s always-challenging job nearly impossible. Miss Mack examines these forces with exacting precision, supported by careful research. Popular psychology labels all parents as dysfunctional; child-welfare bureaucracies persecute them for imaginary crimes; courts punish them for their children’s bad behavior but forbid them to punish their children. Miss Mack rehearses the familiar flaws of the educational establishment, and they’re still depressing. The clumsy destructiveness of sex education gets its own chapter, as does the more elusive problem of increased materialism and decreased meaning, leading to a scary description of “the couch-potato child: sexually precocious, cynical, materialistic, culturally rootless, and overweight.” We’ve achieved the culture our starving ancestors dreamed of, an age of peace, prosperity, and plenty-and this is the fruit (or rather the potato). Miss Mack closes with an examination of “the new familism” expressed in alternative schooling and a general retreat from the culture, and provides seven recommendations for pro-family public policy. But as she acknowledges, the individual parents composing this massive counterculture feel weary and isolated, and not yet much interested in fighting for policy changes. How bad will it have to get before “Leave me alone” turns to “Let me at ’em”?

About the Author

Frederica Mathewes-Green

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The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family, by Dana Mack (Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., $25)

ACROSS the country, across lines of race, class, and sex, hundreds of parents told Dana Mack the same thing: I just want them to leave me alone. “Them” would be the multitude of forces that beguile, direct, or captivate children, and make a parent’s always-challenging job nearly impossible. Miss Mack examines these forces with exacting precision, supported by careful research. Popular psychology labels all parents as dysfunctional; child-welfare bureaucracies persecute them for imaginary crimes; courts punish them for their children’s bad behavior but forbid them to punish their children. Miss Mack rehearses the familiar flaws of the educational establishment, and they’re still depressing. The clumsy destructiveness of sex education gets its own chapter, as does the more elusive problem of increased materialism and decreased meaning, leading to a scary description of “the couch-potato child: sexually precocious, cynical, materialistic, culturally rootless, and overweight.” We’ve achieved the culture our starving ancestors dreamed of, an age of peace, prosperity, and plenty-and this is the fruit (or rather the potato). Miss Mack closes with an examination of “the new familism” expressed in alternative schooling and a general retreat from the culture, and provides seven recommendations for pro-family public policy. But as she acknowledges, the individual parents composing this massive counterculture feel weary and isolated, and not yet much interested in fighting for policy changes. How bad will it have to get before “Leave me alone” turns to “Let me at ’em”?