What an amazingly funny and totally engaging book. The reader is hooked from the first page of the introduction. The author could make a good living writing jokes for Jay Leno or skits for "Saturday Night Live" or "Mad" magazine television. She has actually written for "Mad magazine" just to give the reader a clue to how funny she can be.
Be prepared to laugh as the author makes her child raising medicine go down easier. Her advice is common sense and more of the same. My wife and I had our third grader occasionally taking the commuter train home from his Needham Elementary School on days when my wife (a teacher in the school) had to work late and he loved it. We lived practically next door to the Back Bay Station in Boston. I had accompanied him on the first couple of test trips, introduced him to the conductors and told him to always tell the ticket taker where he needed to get off the train because they'd want to know that information, and I met him at the station until he decided he wanted to go it alone. Naturally, since that afternoon train was practically empty our son Eric soon knew all the conductors personally and they and the other regular passengers kept an eye on him. It was like a traveling version of a small village. Since I guess that qualifies my wife and I as "The Worst Parents in the USA" we can report that our youngest son survived fine and is now a very independent and well-adjusted young, 29 year-old adult.
For us the real dangers of child raising came from some of their teenage friends and high school classmates, but that's another story.
The author is attempting to keep mothers from smothering their children with love and raising them "to be a hothouse, mama-tied, danger-hallucinating joy extinguisher--just like she is."
This is definitely a page-turner of a book, but it may make you laugh so hard that your eyes will water so keep the Kleenex handy. Also be careful your hardy laughs don't cause you to wrench your neck or wake the neighbors with your bellowing. The humor is wonderful; the child raising advice is old-fashioned and "falling off a log" practical. One good suggestion follows another in machine gun-like fashion. One may not agree with every single piece of advice, but the book will open the eyes of many parents. Sometimes new parents can't see the path through the trees because of the media generated fog banks of fear and dread. People forget that television news is also selling a product to attract viewers and improve their ratings. Tabloid sensationalism still sells. If it bleeds, it leads. "As former Tucson anchorwoman Tina Naughton Powers says, `On local news, it's `Good evening and welcome to death, doom and destruction.'" But even in the children's classic "Little Red Riding Hood," she was safe while in the forest and it wasn't until she reached the safety of Grandma's House that she discovered the big bad wolf role-playing in granny's bed. But the village once again looked out for it's own and Red Riding Hood triumphed. Score one for little Red Riding Hood and scratch the wolf.
To help illustrate her points, the author passes on this excellent statistical illustration: "...The chances of any one American child being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are almost infinitesimally small: 0007 percent. Put yet another, even better way, by British author Warwick Cairns, who wrote the book `How to Live Dangerously:' if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, how long would you have to keep her outside, unattended, for this to be statistically likely to happen? About seven hundred and fifty thousand years." This book is packed with this kind of factual information. Facts help parents separate the endless media hysteria and fear mongering from reality.
Typical chapters of this volume include:" Know When to Worry, Turn Off the News, Avoid Experts, Don't Think Like a Lawyer" and "Listen to Your Kids." Common sense rules in this tome.
This should be required reading for all parents. It will help them eliminate their own stress and result in much more independent and better-adjusted children. Fun, folksy and informative read.
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Top reviews from other countries
Celi
Not the world's worst mum. Far from.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 7, 2014
Cheerioh
à lire tout en gardant à l'esprit qu'il est destiné à un public américain... excellent par ailleurs
Reviewed in France on March 2, 2013