Liberation's Children: Parents and Kids in a Postmodern Age [Hardcover]

Kay S. Hymowitz (Author)

Book Description

What is life like for children coming of age in an era after feminism, after the sexual revolution? Kay Hymowitz explores the predicament of a generation growing up in a world where adults lavish them with Tommy Hilfigers, Gameboys, and Disneyland vacations but don't know how to provide them with the ordinary truths that give life meaning. Without a coherent moral and intellectual order to pass on to the young, Ms. Hymowitz argues, parents, teachers, school principals, the media, and the child-rearing experts know only how to celebrate the individual child, "empowering" him to find his own way even as MTV beckons. As Liberation's Children shows, some young people flounder in this spiritual and imaginative void. They curse out teachers and coaches; they try too much too soon; they turn from children into tweens by the time they are eight, and into jaded adults by the time they are fourteen. They become the malcontents of suburban communities. Meanwhile many others eagerly latch on to the one value that seems to cause their elders no ambivalence or embarrassment: personal achievement. As babies they listen to Mozart tapes and use lapware; as toddlers they watch Sesame Street and begin music lessons. By the time they are of school age, they are initiates in the religion of "ecstatic capitalism"-child development has become career preparation. In sharply drawn analyses which first appeared in City Journal, Ms. Hymowitz takes the measure of a young generation afflicted with a loss of deep connection, civility, and moral clarity, as well as a depleted vision of the human predicament.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Most education criticism focuses on poor children's schooling and assumes that more money would make it better. Hymowitz's literate articles on the education of upper-middle-class children, from day care to university, argue that money buys a different, not necessarily a better, education. She shows high-achieving parents cramming their tots for entrance exams at elite day-care centers and kindergartens, and in general attending to cognitive rather than social development. The tykes they deposit in elementary schools lack manners, fellow feeling, and due respect for authority, and since court rulings exalting students' individual rights have derailed school discipline, the kids are successively worse in middle and high schools. Hymowitz doesn't blame the schools per se, however, as much as she scores such encompassing phenomena as sexual liberation, postmodern nonjudgmentalism, and what she catchily dubs ecstatic capitalism, in which the workplace becomes the arena of all meaningful achievement and validation. This is a collection rather than one long essay, and among its rewarding side trips from the main thrust are penetrating dissections of Sesame Street and contemporary feminism. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

This book is both engaging and brutal as social observation... (Paula S. Fass Washington Post )

An informed, intelligent and very powerful critique...Written with wit, with pointed examples and with passion. A very important book. (Judith Wallerstein, Ph.D. )

Adults...should take note of Hymowitz's observations about what 'liberation' has wrought. (Bennett, William J. )

Rewarding...penetrating. (Booklist )

One of America's best analysts of child-rearing...fascinating.... Hymowitz is on to some very important truths...a masterpiece. (National Review )

Scrupulously points out the all-too-familiar obsession with individual autonomy. (Weekly Standard )

Hymowitz raises difficult questions that should not be ignored, and she presents them with a befitting urgency.... Thought-provoking... (Foreword )

Offers an original and coherent reading of contemporary bewilderment about what our children need.... (Times Literary Supplement )

A very different set of insights which parents will appreciate. (Bookwatch )

Sharply drawn analyses... (Adolescence )

A devastating debunking of fashionable ideas that have brought much frustration and heartache to parents and children alike...It is impossible to summarize the many insights of 'Liberation's Children’. Get a copy of each and discover their sobering message yourself. (Thomas Sowell Capitalism Magazine )

Liberation’s Children is a collection of essays that deserves to be knit together into the fabric of a book. (Mark Daims Human Nature Review )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R Dee (May 27, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566634954
• ISBN-13: 978-1566634953
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #758,554 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good scolding from a tough, January 22, 2004

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Stephen Armstrong (Hadley, Ma USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Liberation's Children: Parents and Kids in a Postmodern Age (Hardcover)

Hymowitz's collection of essays has not received the attention that it deserves. This is too bad, because it is a powerful scolding the the laissez-faire, "modern," "child-centered," "feminist you-can-have-it-all," day-care and sex-education society that has little moral wisdom to pass to its children. Her observations on how "experts" have caved into what she calls the "Americal Pastorale Child" motif are apt, and acidic. Her fundamental axiom is this: that all (good) child development depends on a transmitted morality based on self-denial and self-discipline. The only way to achieve these is not to depend on the "inherent" capacity of children to develop these, but, instead, on powerful, care-giving, available adult(s) who decline to take shortcuts, and who take moral stands in their lives.

I loved a number of sections of this book. Hymowitz dissects Sesame Street elegantly as a public TV enterprise that teaches kids to watch TV, not learn literacy. She points out that it is a paradox to teach children and adolescents to be free and also to have self-restraint. She takes exception to the "expert" view that children and adolescents "naturally" develop empathy: "And why are well-nurtured teenagers so lacking this natural feeling when it comes to the suffering that their flagrant rudeness causes their parents?" (p. 61).

Great book, a little hard to read casually, but her message is not a casual one. After you finish it, however, you may wonder, "Well, what do I do now?"

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Children need protection, January 31, 2005

By 

William Muehlenberg (Melbourne Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Liberation's Children: Parents and Kids in a Postmodern Age (Paperback)

Subtitled Parents and Kids in a Postmodern Age, this book features a number of incisive essays on the perils and pitfalls of parenting in today's world. American author Kay Hymowitz is painfully aware that raising children today is a difficult task at the best of times. Children today are exposed to all sorts of pressures and temptations that many of us never had to worry about.

Much of the current wisdom as to how children should develop and how moms and dads should parent is simply wrong advice, argues Hymowitz. Today's children may be richer, better educated and healthier than any other generation, but many are emotionally, morally and spiritually deprived. We have pampered our children, spoiled our children, and immersed them in all the toys, gadgets and fashion they can stand, but most are still ill-equipped to face adulthood.

The proper moral and intellectual training of our children is giving way to trendy socialisation and the impoverishing effects of popular culture. These chapters highlight some of these disturbing trends, and demonstrate how our children are suffering as a result.

The opening chapter takes head on the day care establishment, and the myths surrounding it. Hymowitz documents how the feminist script is harming our children. Get a career, moms are told, and let the day care centres look after the kids. It will be good for them. But the research points in the opposite direction. The younger kids are, and the more time they spend in day care, the worse they fare. But a feminist-dominated media and a child-unfriendly culture seeks to cover up these truths, and make women feel guilty, not for abandoning their children, but for letting their maternal instincts tell them otherwise.

No matter how high the quality of day care, nothing can replace mother love and father love. Yet we are letting a whole generation of our children be raised by strangers. By putting adult achievements and careers ahead of the interests of our children, we are short-changing the next generation and undermining our societies.

A chapter on tweens also makes for chilling reading. Children between eight and twelve are effectively being robbed of their childhood and preadolescence. They are being forced to become teenagers prematurely. Much of this is due to the tremendous pressure of popular culture, advertising, consumerism and mass marketting.

Kids today are heavily targeted by the corporate world, urged to get the "look" and all that goes with it. The worst thing for a tween today is not to be cool. And the ones who make a financial killing off our kids (and their parents) are determining what is cool.

Thus every ten-year-old wants the look, even though it may mean forcing young girls to look like prostitutes. Cosmetics companies, clothing manufacturers, the music industry and fast-food conglomerates all conspire against our children, promoting shameless hedonism and individualism. The hooker look is in, and common values and decency are out.

As a result, tweens are demonstrating many of the deviant behaviours usually associated with teenagers and adults. Drug and alcohol abuse, crime, eating disorders, and precocious sexual activity are all becoming much more common among our preadolescents.

Of course with more and more single-parent households and more and more two-income families, kids are left to their own devices, and the corporate world is happy to cash in on this, to become substitute parents with substitute values and agendas. Absent parents, powerful peer pressure, and a greedy and rapacious corporate culture makes for a bad mix. Kids as a result are growing up in a moral and spiritual wasteland.

Other perceptive chapters on topics such as schooling, Sesame Street, and discipline, add to the gloomy picture of being a child in a postmodern world. But in order to help our children we first need to understand the strife they are in. This book should help focus our minds on one of the most urgent needs any society can be engaged in: making sure the next generation has a proper foundation in which to enter into adulthood and become helpful and productive citizens.

Unless we do right by our kids, society will be left with shaky foundations indeed. And if we do not prepare our children for what lies ahead, we ensure that society will be in much worse shape in the future. For the sake of what lies ahead, we need to get this right. This book helps to alert us to the dangers we face, and the changes we need to make if we are to be confident about tomorrow.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Educational Importance of Cultural and Moral Traditions, May 11, 2004

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Tucker Andersen (Wall Street) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Liberation's Children: Parents and Kids in a Postmodern Age (Hardcover)

This book contains a collection of eleven essays written by Kay Hymowitz and which originally appeared in CITY JOURNAL between 1995 and 2002. The subtitle captures the essence of the common subject matter thread which provides the link between them, they are about the relationship of PARENTS AND KIDS IN A POSTMODERN AGE. The essays in the book are arranged to form a sequential analysis of her topic following the age of children from their early experiences in day-care through graduation from college (essay number nine is titled J. CREW U.) and subsequently into a career; they conclude with an examination of the frequent rejection of the goals of radical feminism by many young women today. However, the dates of original publication indicate a much less direct progression of the author's thought process and commentary, they appear to be a combination of responses to her own experiences and research, reactions to the topic du jour and pieces specifically complementing other commentary from the Manhattan Institute (the publishers of City Journal)

My experience is that pieces in collections of this nature are often uneven in quality, but these are uniformly very articulate and well reasoned commentaries by an extremely thoughtful author with a very definite point of view. That point of view can be summarized as a belief that our culture has largely lost its moral moorings, and that we have no intellectual and spiritual base of agreed upon beliefs with which to educate our children. She examines the basis of the elevation of moral relativism and our unwillingness to articulate a framework of absolute values, and concludes that it is due to the several factors but places much of the blame upon the destructive impact caused by the embrace of postmodernism by large segments of the intellectual elite and media opinion leaders (as exemplified by the adoption of deconstructionist philosophy and methodologies in the curriculums of many leading academic institutions). This has both combined with and reinforced the pursuit of goals predominantly measured in material terms, and has often led to extremely counterproductive results even with the best of intentions. (In this regard her criticisms of day care for the wealthy and Sesame Street are fascinating.)

There is a lot in these critiques that is about as far removed from political correctness as possible, and yet at the same time Hymowitz has probably managed to include some comment in the book which will probably distress even her most ardent supporters. I certainly agreed with the overwhelming majority of her points and enjoyed her style immensely, but on occasion felt her commentary slightly offpoint or her analysis somewhat overbroad (e.g. the chapter on ecstatic capitalism). Regardless of your beliefs regarding our cultural childrearing practices, there is clearly reason to be concerned about the education (in the broadest sense) of our youngsters today. While the Columbine tragedy clearly caught the attention of the nation, the problem is not violence per se but what the prevalence of such violence indicates about the frequent alienation exhibited by the youth of today. The debates about the almost certain overprescription of Ritalin, the abysmal performance of many segments of the population on standardized tests, and the elevation of the goals of diversity and multiculturalism have led to the perverse equation of the freedom which we cherish with the lack of necessity for any internal moral compass. Somehow we as a society have not accepted the fact that the greater the freedom in a society, the greater is the need for a firm personal internalization of the agreed upon moral precepts and shared cultural values which are necessary for the society to effectively function.

I highly recommend this book for everyone interested in accumulating background intellectual ammunition in order to more effectively participate in the current debate about society's educational and childrearing practices. After all, there is nothing more important to maintaining the opportunity, freedom and prosperity which we currently enjoy.

Tucker Andersen