Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them Book

I'm not going to book group and the book wasn't my style. Is this guy really a psychologist? I would have preferred that he just stuck to the interesting studies he cites about the effects of different kinds of parenting and upbringings on children rather than occasionally going off into foggily religious explanations of soul and spiritual development. I may have been a little more sympathetic to this approach if it just didn't feel quite so much like he was pandering to the "Religious Right." It felt a little like the author expected me to have picked the book up so I could feel self-righteous about something.

I didn't finish the book, but there are two things that I did find striking and important in it. The first is that it talks about how studies seem to show that responsive parents tend to have children with fewer, rather than more, attachment issues. If the baby cries, go over to him right away and figure out what he wants. I was a little surprised by this because my parents are little more Dr. Spock-y than that, and I always thought the "let-'em-cry-for-a-minute" approach is a spoiled child preventer, but I'm rethinking this.

The other thing, and this is the more important of the two, was this quote from Henry Louis Mencken: "If you want peace, work for justice." I do want peace, but this book wasn't what I was looking for. Another book about youth crime in America, No Matter How Loud I Shout, is one I would recommend: after reading it, I was upset and ready for battle against all the social ills you can imagine. That is the kind of social justice book I like. And, as the stickers plastered around the Harvard Law campus tell me, IF YOU AREN'T OUTRAGED, YOU AREN'T PAYING ATTENTION!