"The Praise Craze," and "Free Range Kids"

The April 24 WSJ has reviews on two parenting books. Harvard professor Richard Weissbourd has written The Parents We Mean To Be. His research found that nowadays "well-intentioned adults are undermining children's moral and emotional development." Parents have abandoned the "moral task" of raising children, and are "more concerned about fostering happiness than goodness," writes reviewer Dana Mack. "Intimacy is maintained at the cost of authority." Author Weissbourd laments the "praise craze," which is his term for the fixation many parents have for building "self esteem." Our prisons are full of people who esteem themselves, yet have no empathy for others.

Another related phenomenon is the "achievement obsession." "It seems that the more successful parents are, the more likely they are to worry about their children's possible failure to live up to that success." (As I was writing this, a woman walked by with a yellow lab, who had flunked out of guide dog school and was now having a "career change" visiting sick people in the hospital).

One of Weissbourd's findings is that children of immigrants "fare better than their American-born counterparts in almost every measure of mental and moral health." Immigrant parents are more comfortable with imposing authority and discipline, and they are optimistic about their children's future. After all, they made it to America, didn't they?

The reviewer asks a question: Who is ultimately more responsible for the self esteem craze - parents, or the psychologists and educators whose books parents read for advice?

The other book reviewed by Dana Mack is Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy. Skenazy laments the demise of those arenas of childhood that were once inviolably the province of children: unsupervised play, where children "first exercized their moral imaginations and were forced to cope independently with their own shortcomings." The author advises avoiding "experts" and boycotting baby knee-pads. Her contention is that, in a world where the rights of chickens to roam freely are championed, it's time to liberate the kids.