Hold On To Your Kids: a book review

Blessing at the end of Mass by Fr Andrew Southwell, at the 
St Catherine's Trust Summer School

This appeared in Voice of the Family at moment of peak summer busyness for me, so I am posting it here.

It begins:

I don’t like referring to children as “kids”, but this is the title of a book some readers may find interesting or useful: Hold on to your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter more than Peers, by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté. It was first published in 2004 but has been republished this year, with an extra chapter, by Penguin, nothing if not a mainstream publisher.

The idea expressed by the subtitle is not a new one. In 1997, the folktale enthusiast Robert Bly wrote a book called The Sibling Society: An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood, which had a particular focus on how men find it difficult to come to maturity without good father figures. This might seem like a statement of the obvious, but Bly felt that he had to work very hard to get it across to his audience, and he wasn’t wrong.

Read the whole thing there.

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