Un libro que invita a la reflexión sobre lo que estamos haciendo con las vidas de las generaciones venideras y, por ende, con las nuestras. Interesará a los padres que quieran cambiar su forma de proceder con sus hijos, a aquellos que sí que estén siguiendo una línea trazada desde la generosidad y no desde la competitividad y, en general, a todas aquellas personas que creen que otro mundo es posible y que los niños y la educación que les demos constituirán el futuro que nos espera como especie. Muy, muy interesante.

This somewhat meandering highly anecdotal book has little new to say about the foibles of modern Western middle-class parenting. (Overscheduling! Not enough free play! Too much academic pressure! Too many electronics!) Each chapter summarizes problems that have been covered in more extensive detail in a variety of other individual books. His chapter on homework, for instance, draws from The Homework Myth and The Case Against Homework (though Honore is actually more balanced than either of these books in his treatment of the subject). His chapter on play touches on issues later covered in detail in the Free Range Kids. Its praise of dance-through-the-halls and learn-from-your-peers education reminds me of any number of Alfie Kohn books. It’s a good introduction to the concept of “the culture of hyper-parenting,” but if you’ve read anything at else at all on the topic, it will probably seem redundant and insufficient.

The constant alarm bells are a bit much. He paints in sweeping strokes a picture of things that I don’t believe are actually happening to the degree he suggests. The average nine year old is not spending seven hours in front of a screen every single day. Western children are not (unlike the oh-so-much-more enlightened children of poverty-stricken third world countries) incapable of creative play. Those middle-class white kids know how to turn sticks into toys and play make-believe too. The average suburban ten year old is not, in fact, enrolled in five extracurricular activities a week. I do think the challenges, flaws, and virtues of the current generation of children and parents differ from those of the last generation, and I’ve read some interesting books on these differences.

Maybe it’s because I’ve already read so much on the subject that I found this book tedious, but I think the tediousness has something to do with the book itself. When you focus on the extremes (the college graduate who brings his mother to a job interview; the 11 year old with a PDA to organize his half-dozen extracurricular), arguments become less convincing. The current generation is always going you-know-where in a you-know-what, isn’t it? There were times when the author came off as an aging baby boomer annoyed that young kids today might actually be conventional and care more about academics and income than radical change. Over-dependency, potential perpetual adolescence, and a yawning sense of entitlement are concerns I share about “these darn kids today.” But conventionalism isn’t. So some of this book resonated with me, and some of it didn’t.

Way too much anecdotal information, but fairly interesting just the same. I don't think there was anything new here (or anything new for me, I should say), but it's a good summary of modern parenting among the world's well-to-do.

Couldn’t finish. Should’ve been truncated to a New Yorker article.