RAISING CHILDREN IN MODERN AMERICA: What Parents and Society Should Be Doing for Their Children

A recap of all the material, the seminar papers and the findings, contained in Vol. I, this time addressed to the general reader. Ironically this condensation is just as rugged and jargon-riddled--not at all the ""objective"" analysis or synthesis one might have hoped for. Both books share the same basic structure--relating children's needs to ethics, education, television and work. This version, however, has a peculiar--but definite--moral bias: technology is evil; its advances have been destructive to the parent-child relationship, cutting us all off from the natural (and good) life. Talbot indulges in some romantic talk about the satisfactions of older, vanished cultures; he tends to blame the beleaguered parents who no longer instill in their children the ""social and ethical"" values which hold a society together. The erratic life of today's youngsters, their ""amoral and anti-social behavior,"" is attributed to poor family environment and our general lack of responsibility to society as a whole. What's needed, it seems, is social control, not social revolution. Among the recommendations: a new federal ""Child-Family Advocacy Bureau,"" the ""coded records to be subjected to computer-based analysis of key variables."" The analysis here too often seems simplistic, not only confused but lacking in common sense as well as downright repressive and regressive.