Customer Reviews

Leaving Home (Family Living in Pastoral Perspective)

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I own Anderson's entire Family Living in Pastoral Perspective series (Leaving Home, Becoming Married, Regarding Children, Promising Again, and Living Alone), and I refer to them frequently.

Each book focuses on a different transitional event and the family tasks that event brings into focus. Anderson and his co-authors deal sensitively with the pastoral issues involved.

Leaving Home focuses on persons leaving home (both physically and emotionally) as young adults. It approaches the topic not as a one-time event, but as a long-term emotional process. Both sides (young adult and parents) of the transition are covered. Ample resources are provided for ministry to these families.

All of the books are well-written and easy to read--no convoluted prose to parse here. The works have added texture from the many personal examples shared by the authors (both their own and examples others have shared with them).

Every book in the series deserves an honored place on any religious professional's shelf. Except, you may find them so valuable they rarely make it back to your shelf.

I suspect that _Leaving_Home_ is highly useful for folks in particular circumstances: people for whom "home" includes a defined physicality, a sense of belonging and safety, a family; people for whom "to be home is to be able to breathe more easily" (38).

To be fair, the authors try to address the sorts of brokenness families face: they're certainly aware that not everyone experiences home in the same way. But somehow in reading the text one can't help but feel this sort of insistent background judgement that home incorporates these things, and that without them whatever "home" one has doesn't qualify.

So if you're the parents of a teenager heading off to college, I'd recommend this to you -- you'll find gleanings and glimmers of useful ways to think about sending your child into the world. But if you're the only child of a single parent, or from a non-traditional family, or pastor to folks in these circumstances, know that you'll feel alienated from rather than embraced by the text.

We give this to all of our friends whose children are going off to college, as well as a few young friends who will benefit from learning how to leave home well.