the same boat | a small idea from Raising Adults

The same boat

If Boomers like me gave up our ideals in The Big Chill, well our kids may be sorry for us but, frankly, it has nothing to do with them. They don’t hate us for that, they don’t hold us in contempt. But they don’t admire us either, or feel obliged to listen when we go on about things (as we tend to do). Still, they’re watching. For what, we’re not sure. They play by a different set of rules and they won’t necessarily tell us what they are.

Most kids seem to be doing fine. They’re not in jail nor do they seem likely to go there. They get to school or work most days. They don’t carry concealed weapons, traffic in drugs or consort with prostitutes. They seem to be turning out OK.

Perhaps it’s benign neglect: We managed to not screw them up. Or Providence. Providence was very popular with the founding fathers and mothers. It’s in all the early writings; I see no reason we can’t invoke it now.

Or maybe we didn’t do such a bad job on the whole. Maybe the kids are alright. Except that some aren’t doing so well; some days it seems like most aren’t doing so well.

Generation X and Y and whatever’s next are clichés constructed on something observable. That observable something is a disturbing level of aimlessness, sadness, anger, fear, occasional violence, and hopelessness.

Many of our children reach adulthood with a serious deficit of life skills. They enter their adult years emotionally impotent, unable to cope with pressure, socially unskilled, scholastically under-prepared, spiritually undernourished.

I wish I could say these problems belong to someone else. I wish I could say they are urban issues. I’d like to point to out-of-touch rural communities and say, Look, these folk aren’t raising adults. I wish these were the challenges of single mothers, people of color, the poor. It would give me great satisfaction to say these difficulties afflict only the rich. But it’s not true. We’re all in the same boat.

— from Raising Adults

Raising Adults for Nook

Raising Adults is now available for the Nook eBook reader at Barnes & Noble at a price that will make you wonder how you can afford not to own it today.

My favorite parenting book is also available for iPad/iPhone users, Kindle readers and as a good old fashioned PDF from Youth Specialties.

If your idea of "good old fashioned" runs to books made of paper and printed with ink, I have a few dozen copies of the first edition — contact me directly and I'll make you a deal.

Raising Adults for the 21st Century

OK, that title is a play on words celebrating the news that, as of today, Raising Adults is available for:

Kindle at Amazon 

iPad at Apple*

PDF readers of any sort at Youth Specialties

Beyond the word play, I am convinced that people who practice and refine the relational patterns in Raising Adults really do produce women and men who are well suited for life in the world as we know it today.

Priced to Take You Back to the Future

I've put this book in digital form and priced it super-low (just $2.99/$2.99/$4.99 US) because — to cop a line from the writer Cory Doctorow (I'm pretty sure he snatched it from Tim O'Reilly) —

This book doesn't suffer from piracy; it suffers from obscurity.

I decided to remove the risk of buying Raising Adults so more people — I'm thinking anyone on any continent who reads English and cares about kids — can make it their own.

At those prices (we're talking numbers we haven't seen since the 1950s) , reading Raising Adults carries more risk than scraping together the change to buy it.

And in fairness I have to admit it is a somewhat risky read if we can judge such things by how mad this book makes some people of the high control, patronize-the-children-and-keep-them-silent-fat-and-happy school of parenting. Oops! Did I say that out loud?

So. Buy the book to read on your computer, Kindle or iPad — by the way, it's totally searchable when you read it that way so if you need to locate a quick topical quote or a short passage to spark conversation at a parents' meeting, it could hardly be easier.

If you truly hate this book (not so much that you want me dead but enough that you want me to suffer like you did reading it), tell me that and we'll try to work something out — maybe I'll come trim your lawn or something...if you buy the plane ticket.

And if you like Raising Adults, tell your friends.



* If you own an iPad/iPhone, you probably already know there's no online bookstore that you can navigate to from your computer — you get to books through the iBookstore app on your hand held device. You probably also know that Kindle books look great on your Apple device.

Indiana: We Salute You!

Apparently Bill Stanczykiewicz, who directs the Indiana Youth Institute, is hot stuff. His Monday column from Indianapolis is creating a bit of heat here in sleepy Leucadia. Bill was very kind in his assessment of Ten Things We Should Never Say to Kids, which is free, and Raising Adults , which is cheap (but never tawdry).

[You may recognize the image above as coming from today's Gary, Indiana Post-Tribune — How you doing, Gary?]

So, thanks Bill!

Meanwhile, I've been quietly helping Mark Matlock develop Real World Parents to launch in 2009.

And did I mention Rich Van Pelt and I are doing a six-hour extravaganza at Youth Specialties' three National Youth Workers Conventions in Sacramento, Pittsburgh and Nashville this fall? Good times, and I'm not kidding.

Back to Indiana, I'm scheduled to present workshops — on crisis intervention and Ten Things We should Never Say to Kids — at the Indiana Youth Institute's 2008 Kids Count in Indiana Conference
 the first week of December.

Also, I had parents when I was younger, so...if that doesn't make me an expert, I don't know what would.

so it ain't Rolling Stone but still...

Look Ma, I made the papers. Are you proud of me?

those kids and their electric toys

Daniel King is having fun with Adobe Creative Suite.

You can find the real thing here.

Angry + Getting Used To It

[Here's an excerpt from my book Raising Adults, available at the YS Underground]

I cannot control the way the world is run, the way others treat me, the hand I have been dealt, but I can damn well control the way I treat others (especially those who least expect it). — Kate at 20

My mom was an unhealthy model for me in terms of dealing with anger. I was constantly walking on eggshells, in fear of her irrational outbursts. I consequently have a hard time expressing my own anger because I know how my mom’s anger made me feel (like crap, like I couldn’t do anything right), because I’m afraid it’ll jeopardize my relationships, and because I’m afraid of being irrational. — Alice at 21

Anger is the cheapest drug I know. — Brian at 19

Our kids are doing a generational slow burn.

Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. Their anger comes out as contempt, outbursts of rage, mean-spirited humor, stealing, vandalism and every once in a while, shocking acts
of violence.

Urban dwellers are uncomfortably familiar with these things. I know a young man whose little brother was the 58th child killed in Chicago the year the paper kept a running total. The child lived and died in the Henry Horner Projects — the place described in the book and film There Are No Children Here. He was shot in the back, reportedly a case of mistaken identity in a drug dispute.

Across town, Lane Tech is a magnet for four thousand high-achieving students who must declare a major when they test into the school. It’s a tough, exciting academic environment. Things are exciting outside too. Lane features after-school programs that are innovative and enriching — but that’s not why they started. They started because of drive-by shootings targeting who knows who. The after-school offerings cause students to trickle out of the building instead of exiting all at once.

The circumstances at Lane — positive and negative — hardly ever make the news outside Chicago. What made news as the century turned was a rash of suburban and small town conspiracies and shootings. The events were characterized as an unprecedented wave of student-on-student violence. I’m afraid those incidents were big news because unlike the student body at Lane Tech the shooters and their targets were primarily light-skinned children. Americans are accustomed to stories of urban violence and expect perpetrators and victims to be dark-skinned and disenfranchised and the violence to be related to the drug trade. It is unsettling when the profiles don’t fit those expectations.

Here is what we know about the attackers in 37 incidents of targeted school violence between 1974 and the end of the 2000 school year:

76 percent were white

All were male

95 percent were current students at the school where they carried out the attack

85 percent were between the ages of 13 and 18

63 percent came from two-parent homes

41 percent were doing well in school, generally making As and Bs

41 percent appeared to associate with mainstream students or were considered mainstream themselves

44 percent were involved in organized social activities in or outside school

Just 12 percent had no close friends

81 percent acted alone

Fewer than a third were known to have acted violently toward others prior to the attack

59 percent demonstrated an interest in violent movies, books, games, personal writing or other media (though there was no one common form)

63 percent had rarely or never been in trouble at school

56 percent showed no marked change in academic performance prior to the attack

73 percent showed no marked change in friendship patterns prior to the attack

59 percent showed no marked change in interest in school prior to the attack

68 percent showed no marked change in disciplinary problems at school prior to the attack

61 percent used handguns

49 percent used rifles or shotguns

68 percent acquired the gun[s] used in the attack at home or from the home of a relative

54 percent targeted one or more adults employed by the school

41 percent targeted other students

44 percent were known to have chosen more than one target prior to the attack

46 percent carried more than one weapon at the time of the attack

61 percent had a documented history of feeling extremely depressed or desperate

78 percent exhibited a history of suicide attempts or suicidal thoughts at some point prior to the attack

Prior to the attack, 98 percent experienced or perceived some major loss such as a perceived failure or loss of status (66 percent) or the loss of a loved one or significant relationship (51 percent)

83 percent exhibited outward behaviors that suggested difficulties coping with loss

71 percent felt persecuted, bullied, threatened, attacked or injured by others prior to the incident

73 percent had a grievance against at least one of their targets before the attack

66 percent told someone about their grievance prior to the attack

81 percent gave at least one person (93 percent peers) information that he was thinking about or planning his attack

Only 17 percent threatened their target[s] directly in advance of the attack

95 percent had developed the idea to harm his target[s] before the attack — about half developed their idea for at least a month

93 percent planned out the attack in advance — 69 percent prepared the attack for at least two days

93 percent engaged in some behavior prior to the attack that caused others to be concerned — in 76 percent of the attacks, more than three people we concerned about the attacker’ behavior — in 88 percent of the cases at least one adult was concerned about his pre-attack behavior

Revenge was a motive for 61 percent of attackers — though 54 percent had multiple motives

— Culled from The Final Report and Findings of The Safe School Initiative, United States Secret Service and United States Department of Education, 2002

Raising Adults: updated and free (briefly)

[UPDATE: Raising Adults is no longer free, but's it's darned cheap at Amazon for the Kindle or iPad and at Barnes & Noble for the Nook.] 

I'm just about finished with an thorough update of Raising Adults and everything that's complete is available as a free download until January 15, 2007.

Raising Adults was first published in 1999 and the updated edition is on its way to the new YS Underground where it will be available for download in mid-January—along with my digital movies (and a whole bunch of other cool stuff).

So . . . help yourself!

a funny thing happened on the way to the book store...

UPDATE | 07 July, 2008

I wrote this book called Ten Things We Should Never Say to Kids. The notion started as a riff off a book I did called Raising Adults. An acquisitions editor thought the idea seemed good enough to offer me some money and a contract to write about these ten things.

The book proved to be harder writing than I anticipated and I ended up working right up to the last minute. So I wouldn’t say the manuscript was the cleanest, tightest thing I ever delivered to a publisher. Still, I was reasonably happy with it—happy enough to actually hit “send” and deliver the manuscript to the developmental editor.

The developmental editor was less happy. The editor seemed to think that (if I may share my impressions), at certain points I was wrapping things a reader might care about—practical things—in a blanket of things a reader most certainly would not care about—I hesitate to put a label on those things but if did I might call them historical narratives, sociological observations, a few less-than-obvious linkages. The editor thought they were distractions. Both us, I’m sure, were thinking about people reading the book and making something of it. We were not, as they say, on the same page.

Figuring neither of us was probably 100 percent right about the spots where we disagreed; I did my best to blend our concerns in reworking several sections. Honestly, I thought the manuscript got better in the next pass. I’m not sure what the developmental editor thought, as this was our last contact.

The next step in publishing is what’s called a “line edit” or “copyedit.” The copyeditor goes line by line through the manuscript to check spelling, punctuation and the like. On this occasion the copyeditor happened also to be the project manager who would move the manuscript through typesetting and proofreading before shipping it off to production. Which sets the stage for the following digression.

One thing that made the developmental editor uncomfortable was my story about how a non-profit called Focus on the Family assailed a different publisher for something Kara Powell and I wrote called Good Sex. Good Sex is an adolescent learning design on sexuality. I like to say the title is autobiographical which for some reason makes my wife smirk and hold her fingers in the shape of a W on her forehead. I’m not certain what that means but people laugh so I just smile and play along.

Anyway, I thought the letter from Focus on the Family was pretty demeaning and, here and there, a bit hysterical. The letter, and a critical review they promised to publish soon (though I don’t think they ever did), included obvious misstatements—where by obvious I mean a side-by-side comparison of what they said was in the book with what’s actually in the book would show they misspoke. I’ve told the story elsewhere (Focus on the Family Hates Good Sex), so I won’t recount it here.

In response to the developmental editor’s discomfort, I softened my telling of the story a bit. But I held onto the point, which has to do with my perception that adults frequently bluff and bully and generally disrespect kids by expecting them to continue taking the big people’s word for things long after they are quite capable of puzzling those things out for themselves—and not merely capable of figuring those things out but responsible to do so and responsible for the choices they make as a result. The perverse transaction is that, in exchange for taking the big people’s (or authoritarian organization's) word for things, kids get privileges and affection and acceptance. You may recognize this as the same logic employed by child molesters but this is not one of the less-than-obvious linkages I made in Ten Things We Should Never Say to Kids. I saw no need to go overboard.

So. The developmental editor flags the story and I soften it a bit. Then comes the copyedited manuscript with the story missing altogether and a note giving six reasons why the material must be removed. This, I think, is a bold move for a copyeditor/project manager. Conversations with the acquisitions editor from the first paragraph of this story ensue.

+ + + + +

Fast-forward a few weeks. It was clear from the moment the copyeditor yanked the story—as distinct from, say, talking further about how to find a win/win—that this was probably not going to work out. And when the acquisitions editor (who is a good friend by the way) said, "Let me run this by our new attorney," I was pretty clear I would be giving the money back.

Which is exactly what I did. I gave back the publishers advance on royalties, deciding I'd rather take my chances than go along with what I believe to be buckling under to…what? a bully? an 800 pound gorilla? a phantom?

We may never know.

In the meantime I've decided that, since I'm out all that money I may as well turn Ten Things We Should Never Say to Kids into an inexpensive downloadable book — which you can help yourself to right here.