Refreshingly, a parenting advice book worth its salt.
Novelist Edgerton (Creative Writing/Univ. of North Carolina, Wilmington; The Night Train, 2011, etc.) tenders sage yet waggish fathering advice.
Edgerton is a 68-year-old father with four children between the ages of 6 and 30. Here, he offers the fruits of the many ruminations and experiences that informed them, coming at his subject with a wisdom that is still being surprised, daily. Enjoy the good stuff, he writes, and make sure your children are the best of the good stuff. The author is generous, thankful and unmushy, and his advice is more descriptive than prescriptive—though one can hinge on the other. His suggestions and opinions are always spot-on—“A few weeks before the baby is born, go ahead and install the car seat”—and then leavened with humor: “This could take six to eight hours.” There are choice nuggets about in-laws, childproofing, embarking on the Ferber method of letting your child cry themselves to sleep (“After the second or third night, your mother or mother-in-law or the vegetarian will verbally blister you for this ‘inhumane’ practice”), talking toys (“Satan is real and these are among his gifts") and lice (“burn down the house”). He also throws in zingers that bite, like trying to hold fast to the magic and playfulness of childhood: “It’s sad that children’s open-eyed wonder and sense of play begin to fade as they approach adolescence. One grand function of fathering is to keep the fading to a minimum.” Throughout the long, complicated process of parenting, writes Edgerton, it is important to keep your sense of humor. Fatherhood is a dance of extreme ecstasy and deep worry, but “try not to worry too much.” Nonetheless, “be ready for stress.”
Refreshingly, a parenting advice book worth its salt.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-05692-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
A defense of the blended, extended, and amended families that have replaced Ozzie and Harriet and the Cleavers as typically American. Stacey (Sociology and Women's Studies/Univ. of Calif., Davis; Brave New Families, 1990) joins the ``family values'' fray on the side of Americans who have no leisure to debate the virtues of how a two-parents/mom-at-home family benefits children. They are too busy scrambling to earn a living; even if there is an involved father, mom can't afford to stay home anymore. In a relatively short text (there are more than 40 pages of notes and bibliography), Stacey argues that poverty and unemployment, among other social and economic forces, have driven the reshaping of the American family and that critics, whether on the right or the left, have two choices: They can accept and work with the array of families as they actually exist, or they can continue to deny conditions as they are. Moreover, she finds that reorganized families cut across economic and class lines; they are not limited to either the poor or the upper middle class. Both liberals and conservatives target the fatherless household as a prime disrupter of ``family values,'' but Stacey sees the campaign to restore the father to his supposedly rightful place as thinly disguised form of anti-feminism, racism, and homophobia. One chapter is devoted to how groups of social scientists have supported this intensely conservative viewpoint despite research to the contrary. A final chapter defends homosexual marriages and parenting practices, offering this group's flexible family arrangements as an example of new family values in microcosm. Addressed more to the author's sociologist and feminist colleagues than to the general reader. Nevertheless, some telling points are made on behalf of diverse modern families and against the organized ``family values'' campaign.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1996
ISBN: 0-8070-0432-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
A lucid, probing examination of our culture's contradictory and troubled relationship to motherhood—and how it affects mothers. Hays (Sociology and Women's Studies/Univ. of Virginia) interviewed 38 mothers from various class backgrounds. Some stayed at home, some worked; all had young children. She found that all, despite their differences, subscribed to what Hays calls the ``ideology of intensive mothering''—the belief that mothers (not fathers) should spend an enormous amount of time, physical and emotional energy, and money raising children. She critically examines the advice of three best-selling authors of books on child-rearing—T. Berry Brazelton, Benjamin Spock, and Penelope Leach—and finds that they have adopted the ideology as well. Hays provides some helpful social context, convincingly demonstrating that no one idea about mothers and children is inherently ``natural.'' In the past, she points out, children have been expendable or even demonized as bearers of original sin, not worthy of much time or emotional energy, while even today, in many cultures, raising children is the responsibility of several women and older children, not just the birth mother. Hays points out that the ideology is problematic because it perpetuates a ``double shift'' life for working women, as well as the assumption that men are incompetent at parenting and superior in the professional world—which encourages the subordination of women. It also places mothers in constant conflict with the rest of society's ostensible priorities—wealth and individual fulfillment. But she also argues perceptively that part of the reason the ideology is successful and necessary is that in placing a high value on love and self- sacrifice, it offers an alternative to selfish, materialistic market values. A thoughtful analysis of the paradoxes that surround mothering. Hays is sensitive to the emotional issues involved—and equally astute in perceiving their sociopolitical context.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-300-06682-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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