Customer Reviews

Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America

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This is a brief and wonderful account of how American parents came to be so anxious that fretfulness often seems the predominant state in which we live. (The section called "I'm Bored" is worth the price alone.) It's also reassuring; contrary to the scare-mongering of experts and the media, the kids nowadays are all right. Everyone who has children ought to read this sensible and illuminating work; it's worth 100 times its weight in parenting advice books.

"Anxious Parents" exposes many of our parenting worries as social constructions. Stearns shows how the concerns of experts and parents have shifted over time, in part in our attempt to deal with the fundamentals changes in our family lives, such as the rise of single parenting, dual working parent families, mandatory education, consumerism and commercial entertainment. Particularly helpful is his tracing how we came to view children as vulnerable and how we changed in our attitudes about schooling, work, and fun. I recommend "Anxious Parents" to anyone who is open to exploring our cultural assumptions and fears.

An Amazon search finds over 100 books written by Mr. Stearns. When I first noted this, I wondered how it was possible for one man to be so productive. After reading this book, the answer is clear. Stearns book is less an academic work then it is one long ramble ramble. It makes no coherent argument, it simply flits from subject to subject. It makes factual claims, but does not back them up with footnotes -- instead, Stearns simply lists all the books he read before writing this one in the back, assuming you'll be able to find the source for whatever claims he's made in one of those. (Indeed, judging from the writing, the book hardly seems to have been edited at all.) And it does not remain objective, instead Stearns whines about the spoiled kids of today and the "dad as pal" mentality that allows parents to indulge them. This is the kind of stuff that belongs on the Rush Limbaugh show, not in a supposedly-academic text.

And while such half-finished work will undoubtedly waste the time of the reader, it has apparently done wonders for Mr. Stearn's career -- he's now Provost of his college, George Mason University.