Hold on to your Kids

Posted by: stak
Tags: book2019
Posted on: 2019-05-27 19:07:41

Book #8 of 2019 is Hold On To Your Kids. This one is actually a re-read; I read it a while ago and found it really insightful, and it's a lot more relevant to me now than it was then, so I figured I would read it again.

The main premise of the book is that many children these days, for a variety of reasons, are peer-oriented rather than adult-oriented. That is, they look to each other for guidance and belonging, which results in a dysfunctional blind-leading-the-blind kind of situation. This has all sorts of ramifications and compounding effects which the books discusses. It also covers ways to prevent this from happening, or at lease reduce the severity of it.

The book appealed to me in particular because it exposes assumptions in a process that basically only became important once they no longer hold. I run into this sort of situation a lot when debugging code, and discovering the broken assumptions leads to a deeper understanding of the whole system. In this book, society rests on an assumption of adult-orientedness in children, which fails a lot nowadays (in particular since the second half of the 20th century), and the book brings this to light.

In terms of readability, the book is not that great. It can be repetitive at times, and it's fairly dense so takes a while to get through. But it's totally worth it.

[ Add a new comment ]