The emotional life of childhood when parents are absent from the during-the-day lives of their children is often empty, indeed. Although we've heard a lot about the pros and cons of day care for the youngest children, we haven't heard so much about what happens to teenagers deprived of parental supervision after school. These are the chapters that will spark debate. The teenage years are the last best chance to influence a child's character and values, and it's the most sensitive time to shape development, to enable children to see parents as models for their future.
"If yesterday's rock was the music of abandon, today's is the music of abandonment," she writes with poignant documentation.
Coinciding with this lament is the documentation of what happens when vulnerable teenagers in empty houses hook up casually, and always hurtfully. Such teenagers are not rebelling against their parents so much as taking advantage of their parents' absence. You don't need the statistics - though they exist in abundance - to know that teenagers whose parents aren't around indulge in more sex (and acquire more sexually transmitted diseases), drugs, alcohol and cigarettes than teenagers supervised at home.
So what to do? Eberstadt does not offer prescriptions and she doesn't try to fit square parents into round holes. One size does not fit all. There's room in her scenarios for men and women who are better off divorced, for working parents who can't be home and whose children succeed despite all kinds of emotional obstacles. But she accumulates the evidence that requires us to question deeply the tilt of priorities that shortchange children.
No parent can participate in a child's life 24 hours a day. But we can encourage parents to be there for teenagers in bigger chunks of time, both formal and informal. Teenagers are enormously susceptible to rewards and punishments for good and bad behavior if a loving person is present to provide it.
"For a significant number of today's kids, life is worse in important ways than it was for their parents," writes Eberstadt. And, "many of us adults know it."