Generation Next Parenting
by Tricia Goyer
I’m not sure I agree with the basic premise of this book. Or maybe I’m just letting the fact that I fall into the category of the age of the author’s parents. I wasn’t raised the way her parents were. I didn’t raise my children the way she was raised. So I have to wonder, how many people she is trying to group together simply because they were born during a certain time span were really raised the same way she was and really have everything in common that she claims. Yes there are historical events that all who are alive at the time go through. But each goes through them in their own way and while at different ages.
As the author goes through the different things she wants to discuss, she gives the reader a lot of insight into what her childhood was like. As with each of us what we go through shapes into what we become. What she assumes is that everyone else who was born around the same time she was went through similar things. I find that hard to believe. I think the book would have been a lot better if she would have cut out the generalizations and just wrote a straight forward book on parenting.
As with any book on parenting there are going to be things that the reader can use and things that the reader will reject. Since the author is younger herself, the book is geared for parents with younger children.
Reviewed by Lynn Worley
alathrop May 18, 2007
I am a gen Xer born in 1973. I can relate to many of the “things” talked about in Tricia’s book. I was raised in a non-Christian home. Both my parents worked. So my brother and I come home to an empty house everyday. We were alone during the summer from the 7th grade on up.
We had to get up early to go to a babysitters before my mom went to work in the morning. We went through several sitters that I never really got the impression they loved my brother and I. I felt like we were tolerated because my mom was paying them or because we were their “job”.
I was molested by one of the babysitters (male) when I was around 8 or 9. I actually thought he ‘liked’ me.
I was brought up to know that I could tell my mom when I felt like I was ready for sex and she would take me to get birth control (I remember being so embarrassed about that and was a virgin when I graduated). I was also told that abortion would be a good option if I ended up pregnant, because I had my whole life in front of me.
In spite of all this, my parens were good parents. They were doing what they thought was best. We spent a lot of time together as a family, they were very loving and sacrificial.
I know that many of my friends (Gen Xers) have experienced many of the things Tricia talks about in her book. I, like her, have taken what I was raised with and learned from it.
I don’t work outside the home…I know the lonliness, boredom and trouble that resulted. I want better for my kids.
There are plenty of straight forward parenting books out there, and generalizations sometimes harbor much truth…it’s refreshing to read a parenting book that discusses some of the specific issues I dealt with in my childhood and some of the ones I now deal with in trying to raise my two children.