Mary Eberstadt's
Home Alone America is one of the most frightening and heart-wrenching assessments of current childhood that I've ever read. Many parents desire to fob off their children to third party care givers, but with the added luxury of doing it without guilt. The best way for them to do that is by redefining what children need or are. Eberstadt gives solid evidence that left alone children tend to have less emotional intelligence, are more likely to get fat, more readily diagnosed with mental or behavioral problems that "require" drugs, and more likely to engage in promiscuous sex. These absent parents abrogate their responsibility for the emotional, mental, and spiritual well being of their children to anyone and everyone but themselves. Eberstadt states, "We're very good at taking a grain of anything-PCB's, vaccines, hormones, advertising, corporations, entertainment, television, the Internet, brain chemistry-and growing from it some large explanation that adults can hide behind. We say, 'Look there! Look there!' what we mean is, 'Look anywhere but here.' That is the standard ruling our home-alone world, and it is past due for a serious realignment." Eberstadts most troubling point is that despite the increase in material wealth and quality of life that has improved many adults' lives, the children of these adults have worse childhoods than their parents had. While the quality of life may have gone up for adults, the quality of life for their children has gone down.
Too often these kids are being diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, and other disorders to simply make them more manageable and controllable. Eberstadt points out that the bias to drug teens favors the parents /or adults. These problems are rarely viewed in light of the troubled family situations many of these children come from. Imagine what mental or behavioral problems you would have if your parents never nurtured your mental, emotional or spiritual well-being, never allowed you to make any demands on their love, never invested in even being physically present to you. My heart breaks for these children who have been emotionally abandoned by their parents. Eberstadt finishes out the book with a chapter on
"specialty schools". They're for "troubled" teenagers i.e. teenagers getting in the way of their parents plans. Such schools use "tough love" to break a teen's spirit. One school,
Tranquility Bay in Jamaica, forced kids to lie face down on the floor for days and even months at a time. They were allowed ten minutes of standing time per hour. The school record was for one girl who endured such treatment for 18 months! Many such schools are given a free hand to do with these kids as they please. Her descriptions suggest less a school and more a prison for juveniles. "...Just as 'tough love' and manifold deprivations obviously do work for certain kids, so also do they manifestly traumatize and stigmatize others. These include the teenagers (sometimes pre-teenagers) who have ended up in the specialty system not because of drugs or crime or violence, but because of a very different order of adolescent failing:
They were in the way of what adults needed or wanted to do." That sentence stopped me cold when I read it the first time. I felt the pain that these unwanted children must feel. The pain that comes from knowing you're viewed as an obstacle to your parents. Many of the troubles plaguing America's youth would diminish if the adults in their life were actually present. Throughout the ages parents have tried to give their children better lives and opportunities than they had, unfortunately today, the reverse it true. Unlike yesterday's parents, many of today's parents refuse to sacrifice their own wants and desires for the health and well being of their children and the children are paying for it.
