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THE STRANGELOVE LEGACY: Children, Parents and Teachers in the Nuclear Age by Phyllis La Farge

THE STRANGELOVE LEGACY: Children, Parents and Teachers in the Nuclear Age

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Pub Date: March 4th, 1987
Publisher: Harper & Row

A basically positive, thoroughly researched survey of the different ways parents, teachers and children deal with the anxieties raised by the threat of nuclear destruction. The nuclear issue extends to all areas of life, and perhaps the most crucial one, La Farge argues, is that of children. How are children coping with the concreteness with which death has been brought into their lives by nuclear weapons? Do children of different ages and economic backgrounds have different feelings about these weapons? How should children be told about them? How do children affect their parents' attitudes toward nuclear weapons? How is the image of the child used bv antinuclear groups to foster opposition to the arms build-up? La Farge, an editor at Parents magazine, addresses these disturbing questions in a timely book based on statistical and scholarly studies and interviews with parents, teachers and children across the country. Her main conclusion--a conclusion that, if predictable, is still well worth the repetition--is that the more open and supportive a family is in general, the more adequately the child will cope with the particular problem of nuclear anxiety; and in this sense the nuclear question becomes, in this author's capable hands, a metaphor for the larger question of how to raise a child. By looking closely at different strategies for coping with nuclear anxiety among children, La Farge has produced a useful aid to parents and teachers.