The Children We Deserve: Love and Hate in the Making of the Family

“Raising children”, writes the author, “is the most important work in the world, the task at which we dare not fail.” But it seems clear that people have failed, that society has lost its way, and that the betrayal of childhood is taking place on a global scale. From both sides of the Atlantic, evidence seems to be mounting that children are more and more deviant, more delinquent, more out of hand. If they grow up confused and ignorant, destructive and self-destructive, then the society that produces them must be so too. How has it come to this? Where are people going wrong – and where and how are they getting it right? This study tells the story of childhood, through time and across many cultures, from the birth of the child to the death of innocence that is called maturity. Rosalind Miles is the author of “The Women’s History of the World”.