I certainly was unaware that so much of the music teenagers consume is shot through with misery about family breakdown. A group called Blink-182 had a top-40 song in 2001 called "Stay Together for the Kids." Another group called Good Charlotte features lyrics in which a teenager reminds his absent father of his sons and little girl and demands "How can you sleep at night?"
But while the data on parental neglect are certainly out there, the picture is far more complicated than that. As with most historical trends, contradictory things can be going on at the same time. So while some parents are clearly failing their kids in many ways, others are doing more than ever. Most parents of my generation are far more involved, for example, in our kids' education than our parents were in ours. We take many more precautions with our kids than previous generations -- sometimes to a fault, but this is the opposite of neglect.
Finally, Eberstadt urges that the use of psychotropic drugs in children amounts to a quick fix by parents unprepared to invest time in their kids and to do the hard work of discipline. She argues that attention deficit disorder and even autism are not real diseases but rather labels that a too busy society puts on kids who simply cry out for more parenting. In this, she is simply wrong. ADD is real, as is autism.
For years, the medical profession did a terrible injustice to women whose children were autistic by blaming them for the condition. The conventional wisdom was that "cold" and emotionally withholding mothers caused the condition in children. We now know that this is nonsense. It's a neurological problem. Eberstadt is doing the same with ADD. Some parents are better able to handle a disabled child than others, but that does not mean the disability is invented.
So Eberstadt is 75 percent right in this book. Three stars out of a possible four.