The Parenting Crisis: Parenting Today's Teenagers

Michael Ungar is an associate professor at the School of Social Work,
Dalhousie University. He is the author of Nurturing Hidden Resilience in
Troubled Youth.

With so many good parenting books on the market, it would be advisable
to avoid these volumes. First, The Parenting Crisis takes the most
biased of research and presents it as fact. Wooding argues that a lack
of good parenting, mostly attributable to daycares and parents’ (read
mothers’) being in the workforce, is creating a generation of
stressed-out children who are more anxious than at any other time in
history. Such hyperbole and selective scholarship presents the kind of
biased work that only those who enjoyed William Gairdner’s The War
Against the Family (1992) will find affirming. Perhaps our warning bells
should ring loudly when an author spends considerable time in his
writing quoting his critics at length and then pleading for
understanding. Perhaps he should be defensive. Though Wooding insists he
is not against mothers, his book almost completely overlooks the role of
fathers as parents. If this argument were The Parenting Crisis’s only
problem, it might be overlooked, but the book also fails miserably to
offer much by way of alternatives. It is also likely to be a tough read
for parents who are looking for answers and not politics.

Rage, Rebellion, and Rudeness, with the requisite well-pierced teen on
the cover, is only slightly better than The Parenting Crisis. It rambles
on with few case examples, but lots of quotes and even more scholarship,
about everything that our children are doing wrong. If one dares to
venture into this 381-page behemoth, one finds three simple messages
worth noting: “hear me, hug me, trust me.” These messages do not,
however, come from Wooding’s clients in his practice as a
psychologist, but from some angry teens whom he taught in a high-school
values education course. Based on this limited research with youth,
Wooding proceeds with his predictable advice that mothers need to stay
at home if we hope to de-stress our children.