Bad things happen to good parents. In a new book, Parents Under Siege: Why You Are the Solution, Not the Problem, in Your Child's Life, Professor James Garbarino and researcher Claire Bedard of Cornell help today's parents regain control of difficult children growing up in toxic and hostile social environments.
After detailed interviews with many parents -- including the only interviews with the parents of Columbine school shooter Dylan Klebold -- the authors assert that parents are responsible but not necessarily to blame when things go badly with their children.
"The parenting principle of 'you get back what you put in' isn't always a sure thing for today's parents who face more difficult challenges with their children than ever before," say Garbarino, co-director of the Family Life Development Center and the Elizabeth Lee Vincent Professor of Human Development at Cornell, and Bedard, a researcher at the Family Life Development Center. "To regain control, parents must first see clearly the forces around their families, be mindful of who their children really are without passing judgment or having preconceptions and establish authority by aligning themselves with the structures of adult authority in the world."
Garbarino and Bedard focus on the interplay of the temperamental difficulties posed by children and the degree to which the social environment glorifies violence and drugs and is increasingly out of control. The child development experts take humane and compassionate approaches while offering concrete strategies for:
They offer specific strategies to help parents become fine observers and analysts of their children's (as well as their own) behaviors.
The authors write that "By cultivating mindfulness and utilizing specific conceptual tools, parents can learn to see their children as they are, appreciate how parental behavior contributes to the development of children who are out of control, self-destructive or anti-social and realize the path out of impossibility," Garbarino is a leading authority in child development with more than 25 years experience and the author of 18 books and more than 150 articles and book chapters. His most recent book, Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them, addressed the epidemic of youth violence in this country and how neglect, shame, spiritual emptiness, alienation, anger and access to guns interplay to turn some boys violent.
In the new book, the authors help parents assess if they are raising a challenging child, that is, one who is highly sensitive, self-absorbed, defiant or aggressive, and how they can steer that child down a positive path, how they can become authority figures in the face of an increasingly dangerous world and how to counteract the toxic effects of television, video games and the Internet.
Fully indexed and footnoted, Parents Under Siege includes conclusions at the end of each chapter to help parents review and remember the main points, and case studies, examples and excerpts from parent interviews, to help readers see where their situations are relevant to the points at hand.
Parents Under Siege: Why You Are the Solution, Not the Problem, in Your Child's Life is published by The Free Press.
Garbarino will be speaking on "America Under Attack, Parents Under Siege: Children and Families Deal With the Crisis" today, Oct. 4, at 4:30 p.m. in the Founders Room, Anabel Tayor Hall.
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