Hold On to Your Kids

My friend Lisa just finished reading Hold On to Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D., and Gabor Mate, M.D. She wrote about it here. There were also many rave reviews on our adoption agency's email loop. I am just getting started, but it is getting my attention. I have a lot of work to do.

"Culture, until recently, was always handed down vertically, from generation to generation. For millennia, wrote Joseph Campbell, "the youth have been educated and the aged rendered wise" through the study, experience, and understanding of traditional cultural forms. Adults played a critical role in the transmission of culture, taking what they received from their own parents and passing it down to their children. However, the culture our children are being introduced to is much more likely to be the culture of their peers than that of their parents. Children are generating their own culture, very distinct from that of their parents and, in some ways, also very alien. Instead of culture being passed down vertically, it is being transmitted horizontally within the younger generation." Hold on to Your Kids, by Gordon Neufeld, and Gabor Mate, p. 10