I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure--the web--of society needed reform,... not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
American family life has never been particularly idyllic. In the nineteenth century, nearly a quarter of all children experienced ...the death of one of their parents.... Not until the sixties did the chief cause of separation of parents shift from death to divorce.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a famous Middletown study of Muncie, Indiana, in 1924, mothers were asked to rank the qualities they most desire in their child...ren. At the top of the list were conformity and strict obedience. More than fifty years later, when the Middletown survey was replicated, mothers placed autonomy and independence first. The healthiest parenting probably promotes a balance of these qualities in children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not too many years ago, a child's experience was limited by how far he or she could ride a bicycle or by the physical boundaries t...hat parents set. Today ... the real boundaries of a child's life are set more by the number of available cable channels and videotapes, by the simulated reality of videogames, by the number of megabytes of memory in the home computer. Now kids can go anywhere, as long as they stay inside the electronic bubble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we desire a kinder nation, seeing it through the eyes of children is an eminently sensible endeavor: A city that is pro-child, ...for example, is also a more humane place for adults.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface.... So each ...of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children's, and of what our children's future will hold.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rather than accepting the drifting separation of the generations, we might begin to define a more complex and interesting set of l...ife stages and parenting passages, each emphasizing the connections to the generations ahead and behind. As I grow older, for example, I might first see my role as a parent in need of older, mentoring parents, and then become a mentoring parent myself. When I become a grandparent, I might expect to seek out older mentoring grandparents, and then later become a mentoring grandparent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today's children are living a childhood of firsts. They are the first daycare generation; the first truly multicultural generation...; the first generation to grow up in the electronic bubble, the environment defined by computers and new forms of television; the first post-sexual revolution generation; the first generation for which nature is more abstraction than reality; the first generation to grow up in new kinds of dispersed, deconcentrated cities, not quite urban, rural, or suburban.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here is the beginning of understanding: most parents are doing their best, and most children are doing their best, and they're doi...ng pretty well, all things considered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past..., pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past--the portrayals of family life on such television programs as "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" and all the rest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »