Family Room: Books & Magazines

The War Against Parents

By Sylvia Ann Hewlitt and Cornel West

Mariner Books, 1998. Paperback, $14.00.

"Our children deserve prime time and attention and need to sit in the center of life. This is bound to curtail some of our hard-won freedoms…Of course, our negotiations and accommodations would be a lot less painful if we could count on the support of the wider community, which simply is not there. We all know the grinding toll of doing battle every day with the snipes and sneers of our culture." This battle, which parents fight on many different levels is just a response, according to authors Sylvia Ann Hewlitt and Cornel West, to a war already being waged against them.

The book describes how parents have become disabled in their roles as guardians of children as a result of this skirmish. The battle comes at parents on many different levels: the ways in which parents are treated in the workplace, government policies that affect families, how popular culture, such as television, affects our self images as parents and, perhaps most importantly, how our culture currently values autonomy and independence to a point which is detrimental to the very idea of family.

Hewlitt and West's chapter on Popular Culture is most revealing in its descriptions of the subtle, and not-so-subtle, messages we hear on a daily basis. "It seems that every time we turn on TV, watch a movie, or read a magazine, we are confronted with yet another dismissive putdown of the parental role and function." The authors carefully outline the various ways media both reveal and, at the same time, contribute to the negative view parenting enjoys in the U.S. today, using examples from television shows and movies most of us have seen.

This book is carefully constructed, especially detailed in its description of how government policies affect parents. Even those of us who do not have a great knowledge of economics and psychology will clearly understand the facts presented in this work. This is one of those books that should be required reading for any persons contemplating a career as an employer, government policy maker or advertiser.

—Wendy Ponte, mother and CFI Member, Brooklyn, NY