mid 1990's
Reviving Ophelia deals with how current culture is destroying our young women. It's eye-opening, and is really focused on how parents are not able to combat it until they realize what enemy they're fighting (ie the culture- not their children.)
Shelter of Each Other-Rebuilding Our Families is similar, but covers the family as a whole, not just adolescent girls. Once again, through the media and outdated psychological theories on parenthood and childhood, parents are being blamed for not controlling their children for injuring their fragile psyches, etc, when in fact parents are up against the most powerful culture war in all of history.
I can't believe these books, written in the mid-90's have not inspired a shift in our media discourse ten years later! Though they were written before computers and cell phones took over our kids, the messages are still so very relevant if not more so today.
I haven't gotten far in Reviving Ophelia yet, but I am pouring through Shelter of Each Other, Rebuilding Our Families. All the things I have been feeling about the way parenting has been taken away from us the past 20 years, is explored in both these books.
If you feel that you are losing the battle on parenting, step-parenting...like you are on a sinking ship and must either go down with it, or give up...read these.
I am still reading, right now I'm on the first 1/3 of the books regarding the explanation of how our culture has kidnapped our kids. This has occurred mostly due to the media, and current psychobabble trends to blame parents, thereby validating kids to misbehave in any way they wish. We were told to stop hitting our kids, so we did. We were told to protect them from all the evils of the world so we try. Through these seemingly positive changes, kids have shifted to a youth culture of entitlement, lack of motivation and blame.
This is a powerful-no, EMPOWERING read. I have been having epiphanies daily about what our families are going through.
My only wish is that it covered blended families more, because I really see that as the catalyst for this generation of kids to be able to blame away all of their poor behavior, as well as constantly have the ability to manipulate their parents, and develop very poor relationship, social, and life skills. Phipher may cover it somewhere in a later chapter and I'll re-post on it then.
Let me know if anyone picks it up and what you think of it!
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