In The Collapse of Parenting, Leonard Sax, an acclaimed expert on parenting and youth development, identifies an integral problem plaguing American kids, especially relative to various other countries: the dramatic decline in young people’s achievement and mental health. The root of this issue, Sax contends, is based on the transfer of specialist from parents with their children, a shift that has been occurring during the last fifty years and is currently impossible to ignore. Sax pinpoints the consequences of about The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt OUR CHILDREN When We Treat Them like Grown-Ups this change, arguing that the rising degrees of obesity, depression, and anxiety among young people-as well as their parents’ wide-spread reliance on psychiatric medicines to repair such problems-can all end up being traced back again to a corresponding decrease in adult authority.

Sax argues a general decrease according for elders has had particularly severe outcomes for the partnership between parents and their children. The result is usually parents are afraid of seeming as well dictatorial and finish up abdicating their power entirely rather than taking a stand with their very own children. If kids refuse to consume anything green and demand pizza instead, parents give in, inadvertently raising children who expect to eat sweets and junk food and are thus more likely to become obese. If children demand and have the latest smartphones, tablets, and additional gadgets, and so are then allowed to spend the bulk of their waking hours texting with close friends and accessing any website they want, they become increasingly reliant on peers as well as the media for guidance on how exactly to live, instead of their parents. And if indeed they won’t sit still in class or pay attention to adults-parents or teachers-they’re frequently prescribed medication, a quick fix it doesn’t help them learn self-control. In a nutshell, relating to Sax, parents have failed to teach their children great habits, leaving children with no clear sense of the distinction between right and wrong.

But Sax insists there is certainly hope. To begin with, parents have to regain a central put in place the lives of their small children, displacing same-age peers who can’t provide the same kind of guidance and balance. Parents also have to learn that they can not be a best friend and a parent at exactly the same time. They’ll make their children’s lives much easier if they focus not on satisfying their children, but rather on giving them the tools they have to lead happy, healthful lives.

Drawing on over twenty-five years of encounter as a family psychologist and hundreds of interviews with children, parents, and teachers in the United States and across the world, Sax makes a convincing case that if we are to help our children avoid the pitfalls of an increasingly complicated world, we should reassert authority as parents.

“Should be required reading for many parents when they enroll the youngster in preschool…an accessible guidebook to help [parents] regain their rightful assignments.”-Nancy Kehoe, author of Wrestling with this Inner Angels