Over the past 30 years, a major shift has occurred in American culture: there has been a transfer of authority from parents to children. Nowadays it’s common for kids to prefer to hang with their own same-age friends rather than spend time with family. Children today often choose what’s for supper; they may choose which social media they will engage; they often choose their bedtime and sometimes even their school. In the book, I show how these factors and related influences have led to children and teenagers being less resilient, less physically fit, and more likely to become anxious or depressed – and far more fragile – compared with kids from the same demographic 30 years ago.
Some aspects of this collapse of parenting are just as problematic in England and Australia as they are here. In every country I have visited, I have found parents who are unsure about their role. They ask: “Should I be my child’s most trusted confidante? My child’s best friend? But if I am my son’s best friend, how can I tell him that he is not allowed to play violent video games?”
But some challenges are uniquely, or primarily, American. They are:
What happened? Why did it happen? And what do you need to know, if you are raising a girl or boy in the United States or Canada today? Those are the questions I answer in this book.
In the book I tie all these issues together: the declining physical fitness of American kids; the explosion in the prescribing of psychiatric medications for children and teenagers in this country; the rapid decline in academic achievement of American students relative to students in other countries; and the growing fragility of American youth. A completely revised, expanded, and updated second edition has just been published, with new stories, new evidence, and new recommendations.
Part One: Problems
Chapter 1: The Culture of Disrespect
Chapter 2: Food
Chapter 3: School
Chapter 4: Medications
Chapter 5: Screens
Chapter 6: Theybies
Chapter 7: Fragile
Part Two: Solutions
Chapter 8: What Matters?
Chapter 9: Misconceptions
Chapter 10: Humility
Chapter 11: Joy
Chapter 12: The Meaning of Life
I am a family physician, board-certified in family medicine, currently in practice in suburban Philadelphia. I also have a PhD in psychology. I earned my undergraduate degree in biology at MIT. I earned both my MD and my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. After doing a three-year residency in family medicine, I practiced for 19 years in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC. I then relocated to Chester County Pennsylvania. My primary sources for this book are the more than 120,000 office visits I have conducted in my role as a practicing physician between 1989 and today. I have seen children, teenagers, and their parents, from a wide variety of backgrounds and circumstances. I have seen, from the intimate yet objective perspective of the family physician, the profound changes in American life over the past three decades. I have witnessed first-hand the collapse of American parenting.
In 2001, I began visiting schools and communities, first just across the United States, and then in Australia, Canada, England, Germany, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Scotland, Spain, and Switzerland: meeting with teachers and parents, talking with students, listening to professors. From July 2008 through June 2013 I took an extended leave from medical practice in order to devote myself full-time to these visits. I have now visited more than 500 venues across North America and around the world, encountering students, teachers, and/or parents face-to-face. Listening to children and their parents outside of North America has convinced me that we in the United States and Canada now face challenges – of our own making – which are significantly different from the challenges facing parents in Scotland or Switzerland or New Zealand. We American parents are no longer doing a very good job of parenting, despite our large and growing expenditures of time and treasure on the task. I now understand where we have gone wrong, and how to fix it. My prescription is based primarily on what I have seen in the office, but also draws on what I have learned from my conversations with parents, teachers, and kids both within the United States and outside of the United States.