Ready Or Not: What Happens When We Treat Children As Small Adults

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