Compassionate Child-Rearing by Firestone

In contrast to the other two books on child-rearing I read (see here and here), I don't particularly recommend this book. In my opinion, its title and subtitle are quite misleading. The author is a psychiatrist, and he describes many case studies of clinically psychotic patients, both parents and children, who were likely harmed by the way they were raised. The author also points out what not to do in order to, in his opinion, avoid such psychotic outcomes. But he very rarely actually gives any advice what one should actually DO in the positive sense. Less than a third of the book is devoted to positive advice and it remains very abstract, not at all practical. And I would even go as far as saying that the author's advice and conclusions are actually sometimes misguided, as he tends to generalize his findings from the clinically ill to the population at large. While I agree that elements of the described problems are, indeed, present in most families, and one should try to become aware of them and avoid or at least reduce them, some of the radical approaches propagated by the author, such as parent-child separation, while probably beneficial in certain cases, don' t seem appropriate to be applied to 'normal' families. In general, one aspect that seems to be lacking is to try to determine factors that are due to western, in particular American, society and factors that are due to biology (say, due to evolutional adaptation).

Done