Saving Childhood
How to Protect Your Children from the Na
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Saving Childhood offers parents and grandparents practical strategies to cope with a society that seems perversely determined to frighten and corrupt its young. Cultural critic and popular radio host Michael Medved and his wife, psychologist Diane Medved, argue that in a mistaken effort to curb problems plaguing its youth, our culture has changed from protecting childhood as a precious time of growth to hammering even the smallest youngsters with a grim, harsh, and menacing view of the world. The Medveds systematically present unassailable scientific evidence, moving anecdotes, and personal experiences of raising their three young children to explain the attack from four primary directions--media, schools, peers, and even well-intentioned parents themselves.
In a unique analysis the Medveds define innocence not as ignorance but as the result of three components--security, a sense of wonder and optimism. They empower parents and all who care about childhood with concrete, easily accomplished means to fend off the assault, as well as advice for handling hurdles such as the Internet, television, peer pressure, and the plague of pessimism. Saving Childhood enables us to restore and maintain for our children imagination, confidence, and hope for the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Michael Medved, author, former Sneak Previews co-host and syndicated radio columnist, joins his wife, Diane, psychotherapist and author of The Case Against Divorce, in presenting a two-part argument against contemporary America's assault on childhood. The assault, they claim, is four-pronged, and is being launched by the media, the schools, children's peers and, finally, parents themselves. "Most emphatically, we do not advocate any kind of censorship," the authors state; instead they advocate shielding children from adult themes and issues until later in their lives. The Medveds attack broadly defined families, self-esteem-oriented teaching, politically popular ideas of sex and drug education ("they frighten children") and childhood icons of the 1990s--the books of R.L. Stine and Judy Blume. Their conservative slant (Diane Medved co-authored The American Family with Dan Quayle) is supported with exhaustive research from credible media and anecdotal vignettes from their career experiences as well as from their own home. As we meet their children and even share a Sabbath meal with them, their sobering concern about lost innocence becomes valid and relevant. Rather than prepare children for a grim reality, the authors argue, the intact family should hold them safely, until, as adults, they've gained the power and foresight to help solve the difficult problems created by well-intended liberal permissiveness. The defense of innocence, the Medveds conclude, is tri-fold: give children security, encourage their sense of wonder and feed them optimism.
