Book Review: Hide and Seek

Title: Hide and Seek

Author: James Dobson

Date: 1974

Publisher: Fleming H. Revell

ISBN: 0-8007-0653-6

Length: 159 pages

Quote: “Our youngsters need not hide in shame; by applying the strategies I have outlined, we can give them the courage to seek the best.”

Credit or blame for our concern with children’s self-esteem does not belong to James Dobson. Several of the ideas found in Hide and Seek are updated restatements of ideas first credited to Alfred Adler. However, not everything in the original writings, either Dobson’s or Adler’s, seems to have been understood by the people whose obsession with their children’s self-esteem seems to others to be making monsters. If you think today’s children suffer from excessive self-esteem, you might appreciate a discussion on page 59 of how it’s “possible to create a spoiled brat by telling him his every move is wonderful.”

My concern about parents reading this book is that specific advice that seemed important to Dr. Dobson, perhaps in the families he was counselling, may not be relevant to every child. Should parents worry if a child forms a habit of self-deprecation, not just telling friends “You’re good at...” or “I wish I had...like yours,” but telling them “I’m so dumb” or “I’m so fat”? Not necessarily about the child’s inadequate self-esteem, or worse, so much as excessive self-esteem. Those who are winners in the beauty/talent/money competitions, and know it, may have become complacent by competing for too long in too small a group. “I’m so bad at math” may not be a way of saying “I’m an inadequate human being”; it might also be a way of saying “You don’t have to hate me because I’m so lucky in every other way,” and the child might benefit more from spending time around someone who is even luckier than from making a learning problem part of per identity.

Does playing with TV-character toys, many of whom are supposed to be teenagers or adults, hurt children’s self-esteem because they’re not teenagers or adults? I’d have to wonder what else was going on if a child’s self-esteem was all that brittle. Children have always imitated teenagers and adults; that’s what playing is all about. Even running, throwing balls, and climbing trees could be considered instinctive rehearsal for hunting and dodging predators in the jungle. I’d be more concerned with whether a child is able to make up his or her own ways to play with toys, or thinks he or she has to have all the pre-packaged accessories to act out only the pre-packaged stories.

One piece of advice in this book that I hope won’t reappear in Bringing Up Girls appears on page 88, where Dobson even tries to answer the question asked by an adult who begins by saying that a “little girl is sometimes sugar-sweet, and other times she is unbearably irritating. How can I get her out of a bad mood?” Dobson actually suggested, in 1974, that the adult should tell the child that she has two personalities, one “sweet and loving” and one “cranky and noisy and silly,” and she needs to stifle the less lovable part of her personality. Based on my experience of being a child, I’ve meticulously avoided saying things like that to children. I can say to adults that that’s about the most counterproductive thing that can be said to a child.

First of all, vague adjectives like “sweet” and “silly,” which can mean several different things to adults, don’t mean anything to a child, except that you, the adult they can’t possibly respect, are caught up in one of your mood swings again; if you’re flattering the child with words like “sweet” you can probably be manipulated, and if you’re attacking with words like “cranky” you’re probably dangerous; you are not saying anything about what you would like the child to do. If you want to see any difference in a child’s behavior, you need to state your wishes in exceedingly clear, concrete, objective terms. Never use any form of the word “be” when discussing the child’s behavior. Use nouns and verbs, not adjectives. Yes, it will take a long time to spell out all the details of what you mean by "be good" in a way that means anything to a child. Yes, do it anyway, because that's the only way to give a child a working definition of "good." “Don't hit people” and “Hang up your coat” are rational, intelligent things to say to a child; “Don’t be mean” or “Be neat” are counterproductive things to say, no matter how obvious and reasonable they seem to you. Constantly telling a child to “be” different than he or she is can do much more damage to the child’s self-esteem, and to per respect for your advice, than merely letting the child notice that, at a particular stage of development, the child’s face isn’t considered beautiful.

Secondly, human beings aren’t supposed to “be sweet”; nobody wants a child to be diabetic. They’re supposed to communicate what they mean in ways that don’t harm others. It may be helpful to try to guide a child to help adults monitor the child’s “bad moods.” Ask whether the child feels “bad” when doing certain things. Keep a logbook, over a few months, to see whether there are consistent correlations between “bad” feelings and physical factors like what the child eats, how much sleep the child gets, how much time the child spends around other children, what the weather is like, where the child has been. Paying attention to “bad moods” can save parents and children a lot of medical expenses. Trying to enforce a permanent “grinny mood” on yourself, the adult, or on a child can do a lot of damage. A permanent "grinny mood" is a sign of brain damage; if you’ve even thought that you wanted a “grinny” child, you were not ready to become a parent, and you need help. 

Because I feel that my own childhood learning experience was confused to the point of emotional abuse by adults who seemed unable to say whatever they really meant, and insisted on throwing meaningless words at me and other children, I’d even add a third caution to parents who are likely to read page 88 of this book. When you feel that a child is in a bad mood, and aren’t sure how to explain your perception in clear objective terms, it’s possible that your child has discovered the many ways to insert an implied insult into an ordinary sentence in English by using word emphasis. The child probably learned the “vaps” (verbal attack patterns) from you. If not, there are plenty of other places person could have learned them; it doesn’t matter. What you must not do is emote about “that tone of voice.” The child’s voice is not the problem, unless of course the problem is that you are feeling a need for quiet time. If, after prolonged consideration of the possibility that your unmet need for solitude may be harming your relationship with your children, you find that bad language habits like not really listening, interrupting inappropriately, judging and labelling, vapping, or nagging still exist in your family, then the whole family can profit from studying The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense books. These books are especially valuable because they're not about labelling and judging emotions, but about building skills.

In an older book on what an older man was learning from fatherhood, Art Linkletter described his initial annoyance with a letter from a young fan asking "What are parents for?" His annoyance subsided as he realized that too many parents and teachers have only told children what they're against. To which I would add, "...and even then they've not explained what they do want." One reason for that is, of course, that often people who seem to be finding fault with something someone else does (or is or has) are merely expressing their own emotional problems. What difference does it make to you what sort of mood you imagine someone else to be in? Do you seriously imagine that you need to try to control someone else's moods? You can reasonably say "Don't slam the door so hard things fall off shelves" or "Even if you don't feel like speaking to anyone, your dog still needs his walk" or "We don't speak to other people unless they hold eye contact and smile," but there is no need to generate emotional problems by projecting your value judgments onto the moods growth hormones are going to continue to produce until the child is about 25 years old.

When he’s dealing with parents less obviously dysfunctional than that one, Dobson gives better advice. “Avoid overprotection.” “”Discussion is to be done without finger-wagging and accusations.” “[Be] very specific rather than general.”

Studies have shown that the majority of words many parents say to their children are directives. The more these directives tell children clearly what to do (and acknowledge when it has been done), and the less they try to judge any way the child might seem to “be,” the more effective the parent’s words can be in helping the child develop an adequate, realistic level of self-esteem...a sense that only God can judge what any living person “is,” but other people appreciate things the individual can do. 

Book Review: Bringing Up Boys

Title: Bringing Up Boys

Author: James Dobson

Date: 2001

Publisher: Tyndale House

ISBN: 0-8423-5266-X

Length: 257 pages of text, 11 pages of references

Quote: “Boys, when compared to girls, are six times more likely to have learning disabilities, three times more likely to be registered drug addicts, and four times more likely to be diagnosed as emotionally disturbed. They are at greater risk for schizophrenia, autism, sexual addiction, alcoholism, bed wetting, and all forms of antisocial and criminal behavior. They are twelve times more likely to murder someone, and their rate of death in car acci­dents is greater by 50 percent...There is more.”

What was I doing even reading this book? I bought it, of course, for resale. I don’t have sons. I do, however, have nephews. Their father wasn’t man enough to live with four young children at one time, so they obviously have some genetic issues to cope with...and so I can tell you that Dr. Dobson’s motive, in overstating the problems boys have (and cause), is at least partly to assure readers that the boys we’re trying to raise or teach aren’t all that bad. Most kids don’t actually have any of the problems on the list just quoted. I like my nephews.

A funny sort of synchronicity occurred in between the time I spent writing a review of another of Dobson’s books and the time I sat down to write this one. I was near the phone, not actually hovering over the phone, but sort of waiting for updates on two elders in two hospitals—one not expected to live, one expected to go home for the night. The phone rang. Thinking, “That wouldn’t be about Jane, it’s still visiting hours and her children would still be at the hospital, so it has to be Joe calling from home,” I picked up the phone and heard, “This is James Dobson reminding you to vote on Tuesday...”

It was not, of course, Dr. Dobson himself. If it had been, I’m sure he would at least have been polite enough to absorb the information that I always vote. Most people in Gate City who are eligible to vote are peer-pressured to do so, because most of the old families are related to each other in some way, which means that few of us could get away with failing to vote for any Kilgore who is on the ballot. Regarding other candidates we might get away with saying, “They’ll win without my help; they always do,” but when a Kilgore is on the ballot we’d get, “You mean you think you’re too busy to vote for your own third cousin twice removed? Now that’s just ridiculous. You can’t be too sick to go in and vote. If you’re too sick to drive I’ll come out and take you.” So we vote. I don’t really need to be prodded, even by James Dobson in person, much less by some geek who’s wired a recording of his TV voice into a computer somewhere.

The annoyance of getting a “robot call” is enough to influence my vote—anyone a phone pest wants me to vote for, I’m more likely to vote against—and I’ll wager that, when the “robot call” sounds like some well-known person who’s respected even by the opposite party, it’s actually coming from the opposition party. Dr. Dobson has been on TV long enough, and stayed out of trouble long enough, that the worst thing his enemies can do to him is probably programming his voice into an obnoxious computer-calling device. 

End of rant...back to the book. Do you, as a parent, teacher, custodial relative, baby-sitter, etc., want to read what Dobson has to say about the care of little boys? A summary of what he says may be helpful.

As a family counsellor, Dobson isn’t worried by the appearance of gender stereotypes in rival siblings; he titles one chapter “Vive la Difference.”

He lists a range of sex-influenced mental problems that boys can have but discusses only attention deficiency in detail. Although the others are more common in males than in females, they’re not common.

Like too many authors, he hears loudly and clearly the words of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, “This is for everyone who teased us,” but overlooks the “prescription medication” that was aggravating and distorting the memories of whatever blows to their self-esteem they and the other schoolboy killers had suffered.

He discusses evidence that little boys instinctively crave a father figure and typically start moving away from Mom and toward Dad, unless Dad is abusive, as toddlers.

He observes that most boys are noisy, impulsive, restless, destructive, and competitive, but charitably mentions that about 15% of little boys are relatively calm and quiet and are not likely to grow up effeminate...just intelligent.

He defends the traditional role of fathers as providers, protectors, leaders, and spiritual directors..

He warns mothers that, although disrespect should not be tolerated, most boys are going to have a need to reject or disrespect their mothers at some time in life.

He idealizes the work of a full-time mother, warning that yuppie mothers who worry about getting onto a “Mommy Track” may be merely “chasing the caterpillar” ahead of them, as the peculiarly stupid processionary caterpillar can often be persuaded to do until it starves to death. (I think conservatives are barking up the wrong tree with this one. Instead of nagging women to quit work for the sake of two to five years of full-time motherhood, after which the women's careers may never get back on track, the conservatives would do better to demand that employers rehire women who take time off to be full-time mothers and men who take time off for full-time military service.)

He insists that the origins of homosexuality lie in emotional problems parents should prevent. He observes that, while teenaged girls seem to do just as well or better without a father figure in the house, teenaged boys just might do just as well or better if they lived with their fathers and had no mother figure in the house—this doesn’t happen often enough for anyone to be sure. (I will say that my late lamented Significant Other, as a single foster father, did raise a shining jewel of a Lad.)

He affirms the benefits to children in spending quality time with grandparents.

He advises parents not to try to make boys less competitive, but try to help them win.

He’s concerned that “stupid guy” jokes may damage the self-esteem of little boys. He encourages home schooling as an option for boys who don’t fit into the classroom environment.

He classifies unchristian moral influences, as well as pedophiles, as “predators” likely to harm children.

He encourages parents to enforce rules, while warning them that “rules without relationships lead to rebellion.”

Although a well-known advocate of Tough Love, he recommends relatively mild displays of Tough Love as routine discipline for children.

My concern would be that today’s young parents, lacking historical background, may find some of his advice inexplicably strange. Doesn’t everybody know that nobody can afford to be a full-time mother any more, economically or socially, and society no longer has much use for guys who can’t develop the attention spans and self-discipline and tolerance for sitting still that the girls modelled for them in elementary school, and so on. Well, no; while today’s parents are beneficiaries of whatever the 1970s wave of feminism accomplished, good and bad, Dobson was one of the older, conservative-minded men who never were comfortable with the 1970s feminist movement. A full half-dozen TV stars, including Kathie Lee Gifford, Frank Gifford, Regis Philbin, and Kathie Lee’s first husband, got a huge publicity boost in the 1980s as Dr. Dobson gave Kathie Lee fatherly or pastoral advice to quit TV and try to be a full-time housewife, and her first husband discovered, along with her, that he didn’t want a full-time housewife, and so on. Dobson has lived and learned, and Bringing Up Boys reflects plenty of recent research and awareness of the way things are, but it’s still obvious that a part of him wishes that the “Leave It to Beaver” TV show had ever resembled the way most real families were.

How harmful is this kind of advice likely to be, especially if parents have girls as well as boys? I’m going to split hairs, go out on a limb,  try to think of another metaphor to add to this mix, stick my neck out and say: I don’t think this is the harmful kind of advice from the prefeminist era. The kind of devoted family Dobson has in mind may not be as bland or as smooth as the Cleaver family on television, but neither is it abusive or oppressive.

In the carefully orchestrated trend for people to abandon farms and rural environments and flock into cities, I see a massive male identity crisis: there aren’t a lot of jobs in the city that give men a chance to “win” by using their upper-body strength and physical energy. These things are assets; men deserve to be able to use and enjoy them. I could wish that Dobson had shown more concern about this, and less misplaced concern about stupid guy jokes or girls who excel in sports. 

Women my age learned to base our self-esteem, among other things, on our not acting like the female stereotypes in the dumb blonde jokes, catty brunette jokes, bossy mother-in-law jokes, nagging wife jokes, big-spending daughter jokes, etc. etc. ad nauseam, that men told; if men can’t learn to cope with stupid guy jokes in the same way, they really are inferior. 

But I don’t think there ever was or will be a problem with women lacking respect for Real Menschkeit (as distinct from stupid redneck macho acts). The problem is that not enough men are developing and demonstrating Menschkeit, as distinct from machismo. They probably need to depend on the help of God to become admirable human beings first and let nature take care of the sex appeal (no worries, it will). I think this is the problem Dobson is trying to address, and, to the extent that he or his audience are able to help resolve it, women will not complain.

Book Review: Love Must Be Tough

Title: Love Must Be Tough

Author: James C. Dobson

Date: 1983

Publisher: Word

ISBN: 0-8499-0348-3

Length: 212 pages

Quote: “There would be fewer bitter divorces if young husbands and wives knew how to draw therir drifting partners toward them, rather than relentlessly drive them away.”

Dr. Dobson thinks the concept of tough love is “relevant to all human relationships...business and labor, guards and prisoners, Americans and Russians.” He doesn’t want readers to think he’s promising them more than he can deliver: “Genuine insights into human behavior are not everyday occurrences...if one stumbles into two or three fundamental principles in the course of a lifetime, he has done well. The pages that follow focus on one of my allotted few.”

His insight was that it takes two people to save a relationship. If the other person refuses to do anything to save it, your best chance is to toughen up, stand on your principles, get a life of your own, and let the other person come back around to you. Or not.

In the early 1980s, Dr. Dobson was actually offering a big improvement over what some Christian counsellors were telling people, which was to forgive everything, be a doormat, keep pleading for love and being rejected, and offer your misery up to God.

Now that we’ve all agreed that walking away from a relationship before it becomes toxic is more likely to work toward everyone’s Highest Good than enabling abuse is, however, there is a need for a next step. Christians who are not in twelve-step groups have yet to discover the power of community to help tough love work.

A young couple “fall in love,” get married, believe that making babies is the only way they can really “make love,” and do it often. After ten years, the husband notices that love is not exactly what he feels for his messy house, his five needy whiny children, and his fat, depressive, lactating wife. If he were a Real Man he’d get tough,. himself, and recognize that feelings are supposed to come and go, and plan on doing the decent thing for a few years until the children reach a more enjoyable stage of development and the wife recovers her health. Real Men, however, were always a minority; in his generation they’re an endangered species. So he makes excuses to move out—“on business”—and, since he has a good income and has moved into a low-rent neighborhood, very soon he’s sharing a house with a divorced woman. Then he’s sharing a bed. Then they have a baby. Then he’s genuinely torn for a while, because his wife is beautiful (apart from the temporary weight problem) and has Background, whereas the divorcee is frequently mistaken for a fat boy and is known among her people as White Trash, but in the end, the house with one infant seems more pleasant than the house with five. So he files for divorce.

Now, more than twenty-five years after Love Must Be Tough was first published, at least all the qualified and unqualified counsellors are telling the divorced mother the same thing. Give him tough love! Raise the babies alone! Show him that you’re a thoroughbred! Living well is the best revenge! Get a better job than he’s got, lose the surplus weight, put all five kids through college without him! Go, girl!

It all sounds good, and plays well on TV, but reality is that she's not qualified for a job that's going to put anybody through college. There are those who say, “What she needs to do is beg for handouts.” First of all, there’s a long line of people waiting for every handout our government can still afford to offer, and we all know our government is offering more than it can afford. Then, if she has any assets, such as her looks and Background, instead of feeling moved to help her, social workers probably feel inclined to gloat; they don't want to help her back up to the lifestyle to which she is accustomed, they want to push her further down into the mire. Maybe they can "help" her move into a housing project where she has to share a bathroom with a drug dealer.

Christians need to learn from the apostles’ example. The apostolic church was not content to sit around telling people how they were supposed to feel. The apostolic church understood “love” as an active verb. Although some apostolic church communities actually practiced voluntary communism, or communalism, for a while, no apostolic church community was foolish enough to offer handouts to people who were able to work. Even the “widows...taken into the number” of respectable ladies over age seventy still seem to have been expected to give something back to the community. Instead of doling out handouts and pauperizing people who wanted to be useful, the apostolic church put these people’s talents and energy to work. St. Paul ordered them to “Let him that stole steal no more, but let him labor...that he may have to give to him that needeth,” and, “If any will not work, neither let him eat.”

It would be pleasant if Dr. Dobson had written another book advising Christians how to help fat, depressive, heartbroken rejects practice Tough Love and be fascinatingly independent. That mother of five needs help on both practical and emotional levels if she is going to practice Tough Love. Women, particularly, need to rally around a woman who is in financial straits. This may be hard to do, especially when the lady in distress is still prettier than they’ll ever be, but if they don’t do it their husbands will. They need to keep this woman busy; they need to make sure her income is steady and her loyalty is to them rather than to their husbands.

Well...that’s the book I think Dobson needed to write. What about the book he did write? It’s still worth reading today. If you’ve already heard a lot about Tough Love, as it might be in a therapy or recovery group, you might feel that you no longer need to read all the examples of tough love Dobson shares. If the concept is relatively new to you, even today, then you might still need to read the whole book, with specific examples of how Tough Love can help people whose spouses have left them or cheated on them, families plagued by domestic violence, families of addicts, parents and teenagers, and so on.

Actually, although the first few chapters try to be inclusive, the first two-thirds of the book deal mostly with adultery...probably reflecting Dobson’s counselling experience; the book never discusses examples of Tough Love between “Americans and Russians.” Dobson had discussed Tough Love for parents and children rather thoroughly in Dare to Discipline and Preparing for Adolescence. The final third of this book discusses other family situations that call for Tough Love. Dobson was among the first Christian counsellors to advise wives to leave abusive husbands--not to remarry, just to go somewhere else for their own safety and that of the children.

Those interested in being counsellors probably need to read the whole book. Counsellees may skim over the sections that don’t apply to them. 

New Book Review: The Secret Thread

Title: The Secret Thread

Author: Eve Chase

Date: 2026

Publisher: Ballantine

ISBN: 978-0-593-97626-5

Quote (from the galley proof): "[I]nteriors queen Mimi Mott is selling her legendary estate." 

As regular readers know, one stage in the process of traditional book publishing is, when the author and publisher have agreed that the book shall be published, sending a cheap paperback or electronic copy to reviewers so that reviews can be published on the day the book reaches the store. These copies, traditionally called "galley proofs," go out while there's still time to change a word here and there, so publishers remind reviewers not to quote extensively. This book is about what happens when Mimi sells her estate, so chances are that the line quoted above will be in chapter one of your book when you buy it, but it might not be. 

In the world of this novel Mimi Mott's "Mimi House" interior decorating business was not merely a success, like Studio McGee, Kelly Wearstler, or Nate Burkus. It was a household word. Mimi Mott was the influencer of influencers, was to building design what Anna Wintour was to fashion design, became rich and famous. 

Jo, a young writer, really wants to be chosen for the job of writing the book that will go with the sale of Mimi Mott's estate. Mimi has never written a memoir before. In her seventies she thinks she ought to write one, but she needs a real writer's help. Jo wants the publicity Mimi can give her career, and when interviewed she likes Mimi's other assistant, but there's more to her story. She has reason to think Mimi is her great-aunt.

Mimi (originally Miriam) and her older sister Pamela, whom Jo calls Granny, are indeed sisters who've avoided each other for years. They were close; they've missed each other.

Their temperaments were different. Their parents had chosen gardening as a business and a lifestyle. Before "going back to the land" became a trend, the sisters' parents felt that their simple, frugal, rural life was part of their Christian faith. (This is back-story; living members of the family don't talk about their religion, if any. Though forgiveness is a major theme this is not a Sunday book.) Pamela was close to her parents and brother, and wanted to preserve her rustic introvert lifestyle as an adult. Mimi wanted to get out and be a socialite in the city. Both sisters got what they wanted; if that were all of their disagreement they could be happy seeing each other once or twice a year. As things are Pamela's never even told her child or grandchild that she had a sister.

It began, Mimi says, when both sisters liked the son of their clients, and he liked them....and she goes on with the three-generation saga of Jo's family, not consciously aware that Jo is part of that family. 

The ending is not altogether happy (clue: younger sister over seventy years old) but a family that's too nice to be divided, as this one's been, will be reconciled at the end. Not without Pamela, the quiet rural sister, having her chance to get in the last shocking word....

I enjoyed this novel. I came across just one British phrase that I had to google. Mimi remembers liking "Flakes in my Mr. Whippy." By "Flakes" she means Cadbury Flakes chocolate bars, which were made in a small size especially for tucking into "Mr. Whippy" or other forms of vanilla ice cream. The whole family are fond of food, both "healthy" and junk. If your book club chooses this book, everyone will have something to cook for the monthly book-theme buffet party. (A page of discussion questions is also provided for book clubs.)

Recommended to any adult reader who has, or had, or wanted to have a sibling. I wouldn't expect children to enjoy it but there's no serious violence or graphic sex to hide from them. Well done, Eve Chase, crafting a wholesome story that kept me interested through 52 chapters.

Book Review: The Strong-Willed Child

Title: The Strong-Willed Child

Author: James Dobson

Date: 1978

Publisher: Tyndale

ISBN: 0-8423-6661-X

Length: 240 pages

Quote: “Most parents have at least one such youngster who seems to be born with a clear idea of how he wants the world to be operated.”

It’s James Dobson, so you know what to expect, right? Religious Right? Right! Dobson may be remembered as an advocate of physical correction for children.

I personally believe that parents have a right to use reasonable physical correction on children. I was spanked as a child, by other older people as well as my own parents, and I don't think it did me a bit of harm. In fact one of the more loving things my father ever did for me, as a child, was to knock me down flat...before I could step on a venomous snake. I'd hope I'd be able to do that for a child today. However, apart from a few obvious correctives like "Don't step on that snake" or "Don't play with matches" or "You're not allowed to hit other people," I don't remember spanking doing me any good, either. It didn't leave physical or psychic scars but it completely failed to teach me what adults wanted me to do instead of whatever I'd been doing. Before trying to justify slapping a little hand, adults need to consider what we want the child to learn. If it's "Keep the house clean," then instead of slapping the child who carelessly spills food on the floor, it makes more sense to direct the child to clean up the mess. Venting emotions at children may or may not scare them; it does distract them from absorbing information. It teaches them "Teacher doesn't like me" instead of "Kicking the back of the seat ahead of me is rude."

If you have a reasonable level of tolerance for Dobson’s school of thought, there’s still room for doubt about how useful a book about rearing children can be. Dobson can’t even claim extensive firsthand experience with being the parent of a strong-willed child; according to him, the member of his household who best exemplified this trait was a dog. Dobson is an expert on applying Bible teachings to family matters, but in this book he is admittedly out of his field, and it shows. Strong-willed children can be introverts or extroverts and this is one case where the distinction is crucial: the way adults relate to an introvert child’s will needs to be almost opposite from the way they relate to an extrovert child’s will. Dobson’s approach is geared only toward extroverts.

Dobson’s dog was never very well trained, but it did eventually learn to obey “a few simple commands.” One day, after years of obeying “Go to your bed,” the dog defied Dobson and wanted to spend the night on the fluffy toilet lid cover near the heater. It growled, snapped, tried to bite. “That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast” before Dobson moved the dog into its bed. The next night, when told “Go to your bed,” the dog went. Dobson reports that during the next four years it didn’t challenge Dobson again.

Strong-willed children, Dobson is saying, are like his little “alpha dog.” They challenge adults. A young father whose idea of quality time with his child was to take a three-year-old to a basketball game told the kid, “don’t go past this line.” “He had no sooner returned to his seat than the toddler scurried in the direction of the forbidden territory...and deliberately placed one foot over the line.”

The archetypal, or Archie-Bunker-typal, right-wingers in Dobson’s intended audience clearly believed that parents and others who work with children need to be “tough enough to make [the children] obey.” Those who believe that humans should “obey” other humans only in the sense of respecting others’ rights and boundaries, that the way to teach children math or manners or morals is to call their attention to our examples when necessary, may not like this book.

The strong-willed or Type A personality trait is sometimes considered basically an extrovert trait—the only functional personality trait that is correlated with extroversion. That may account for Dobson’s neglect of introvert children. However, the trait is independent of extroversion. In fact Type A’s who don’t show the more fully developed neurological “wiring” of true introverts still tend to be high-functioning extroverts, who “like to get things done, whether with others or alone,” and while they like to take control of their environment they don’t compulsively clamor for control of other people’s attention. To assume that “the strong-willed child” is an extrovert is probably a mistake. 

Introverts are not shy so much as inner-directed; if what they want to do can be better done with a group, they can organize and lead the group without showing any interest whatsoever in maintaining “social leadership” as a form of ongoing control of other people. The “natural leader” of one activity may, in the absence of personal hostility, prefer to let someone else be the “natural leader” of another activity. It’s possible for Type A’s who identify as extroverts to be survivors of twentieth century America’s cultural war on introversion, during which we were told things like “You aren’t, or don’t want to be, an introvert—you’re not shy, you’re attractive, persuasive, a natural leader when you choose to be...” Neurological tests might quantify how many Americans who consider themselves to be extroverts are, in fact, no such thing. It would be interesting to know the results of neurological studies on many celebrity politicians, movie stars, athletes, and business leaders. Successful musicians are typically introverts; I suspect successful people in other fields may be strong-willed introverts too.

Little introverts may or may not be particularly strong-willed, but when they are, it’s unlikely that even the human version of a “vicious fight” will do them much good. Unlike dogs, children grow bigger and stronger, and see that adults grow less strong, every year. A strong-willed introvert child who is subdued for the moment by forcible correction will eventually hit back. On the other hand introverts have that inner sense of “rightness” that, if the child is not battered, will naturally teach the child that hitting other people is as wrong as singing off key, coloring outside the lines, or leaving a mess on the floor. Parents can recruit the strong will of an introvert child. This is the child who may need occasional correction, but generally behaves reasonably. Misbehavior is usually best corrected by addressing the reason for it. Attempts to “break” a strong-willed introvert child can be physically dangerous to the adult, or to a younger or slower-witted child on whom a child like Charles Schultz’s “Lucy” may dump emotions. This child must be reasoned with.

Practical rewards and punishments for these two types of children are almost mirror images. Almost all children perceive candy as a reward and beating as a punishment, but obviously neither candy nor beating can be used every day. What introverts want in social relationships is the kind of respect that backs off and allows them to do things by themselves; they don’t particularly want attention, and may perceive group attention as a punishment. What extroverts want is control of as many people’s attention as possible; they like to be liked or respected, but they’d rather start a fight and lose it than be left to do something by themselves. Parents can use their attention to reward and punish specific behavior. Introvert children respond well to directives like “When you’ve accomplished X, you earn points toward (money, computer time, etc.).” Extrovert children may need directives like “When you’ve been completely quiet for one hour, then I’ll listen to you for five minutes.”

Confusion is understandable since strong-willed Type A’s are the ones who invented the idea of “ambiverts.” Either they have introverts’ neurological assets or they don’t. Mostly they don't but, given adequate motivation, they can be comfortable either working alone or organizing groups of people to focus on the tasks of their choice. Usually they’re intelligent enough to see the advantages of working well with others, so after the toddler tantrum stage they develop good, often charming, social manners. Their strong personalities can easily seem to have both introvert and extrovert “personality strength.” They tend to like this idea; they like to think they’re in full control of their own personalities. However, for purposes of behavior modification, it will help adults to know which a child really is.

While Dobson is probably right about it being good for young children to know that their parents’ wills are even stronger than theirs, the image of a “vicious fight” may still be inappropriate. Type A’s can perceive their ability to laugh off punishments as desirable enough that they actively invite punishments. While some Type A’s internalize the idea of not only strict but harsh physical discipline, and grow up to be child abusers, others convince themselves that they’ve been martyrs for their “cause” of sloppiness, irreverence, profanity, sexual self-indulgence, or disrespect of their elders. The prudent adult will use insight into their temperament to reinforce desirable behavior with positive rewards. Type A’s respect a firm consistent stand longer than they do a “vicious fight.”

By overlooking neurological differences, Dobson produced yet another twentieth century book that may be useful to parents of extroverts, but drifts in and out of touch with reality as introverts know it. By 1978 the world didn’t need any more of those.

Book Review: High School Confidential

Time for a rerun. This book is now twenty years old. It's unlikely, but possible, that the real high school students whose identities were blurred into this book now have children in high school. I remember seeing in a bookstore, but not buying, a book by a writer in his twenties going back to high school "undercover" in the early 1980s. Google has never helped me find that book, though Google now reports that someone did something similar in the 1960s...somewhere a baby-faced adult may be attending high school classes as a teenager now. Not only do I think this book is still relevant; I think it would be interesting to read all three, or by now four, books and consider what's changed and what's the same in all of them.

Title: High School Confidential

Author: Jeremy Iversen

Author's web page: http://www.jeremyiversen.com/

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Date: 2006

Length: 447 pages

ISBN: 074328366X

Quote: "I had to find out if I could still pass for seventeen."

Jeremy Iversen went to prep school. Then he went to college. Then he decided that, before doing a job, he wanted to go to public high school, just for one year, just for the experience. Also, since he was from the East Coast, he wanted his second year of grade twelve to be in California.

He passed. So, of course, he was drawn into a high school social drama that starts off slowly, with gossip ganked from his friends' blogs. (Thanks to the invention of blogs, high school boys can now "write" credible first-person narratives about high school girls, and vice versa.) The plot thickens, though. By the time Iversen is emotionally committed to one side of one conflict between students and school administration, readers feel involved too.

If you're a high school or college teacher or student and you've not already read this book, you need it. A high school teacher reported to Amazon: "I have never received more polished or more passionate essays than the ones my students compose in response to this book."

The school fictionalized as "Mirador High" isn't necessarily the most typical high school in North America--I would guess much wealthier students, much less supervision, much more efforts in the direction of political and religious conservatism even at the same time that kids carry on the sex and drugs experiments their conservative parents dread, and much more access to sex and drugs for all the teenagers, than you'd find if you went undercover at your local high school. It's real, though. The lifestyle of Jeremy Iversen's friends in the popular twelfth grade crowd at his Orange County, California, school may be beyond the reach of even the preppiest, richest, and most popular students at some schools, but it's what some kids are reaching for.

The book is well written, despite its sprawling length and sizable cast of characters. Lots of laugh-out-loud moments. Some tear-jerking moments, too--little did Jeremy know that, as he joined a high school social clique, he was replacing a boy who'd died a few months earlier, whose friends would remember him all year. Teen alcoholism. Sneaky sex. Incompetent teachers. The recent phenomenon of "teaching to the test." Kids covertly videotaping other kids in bed. Bullying. Kids goofing off on their jobs. Mean girls, who demand a "powder puff football" match because the organizer "just wants to beat the [rude word] out of" another girl; when parents and police show up to watch the game, the organizer whines, "This is so unfaaair...I don't want to play reeeal football," but her buddies force her onto the field saying "This was your idea," and the principal "defensive play" consists of one girl growling, "I'm a lesbian, and I...want...your...body." A boy who's gained such a reputation for troublemaking that even when he's behaving well he's punished on suspicion.

Race hate? Iversen seems particularly interested in exploring this aspect of social life in California, and finds an interesting state of confusion among his friends. The popular clique is integrated. Younger and poorer kids, so far as Iversen can tell, don't belong to multiracial social groups, but then many of them have only one school friend or none--that's not changed. Some of the White students sport "White Power" souvenirs. The general level of confusion about race relations in California has always been pretty interesting, with Valspeakers going, like, "There've never been enough Black people in California for real race problems to develop," while Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, Rodney King, and anyone who remembers the Watts riot of 1965, definitely disagree. I'm not sure to what extent Iversen succeeds in clarifying matters for the rest of us, or for himself.

Violence? Not much, but some. Teen pregnancies? Not many, but some. Use of "hard" drugs? Not a great deal, but some. Filthy language? Lots of it. Evidence that teenagers understand how much hate, violence, and obscenity their favorite words communicate to adults? Not so much of that.

If you've ever been a teenager, High School Confidential is a fun read, and warmly recommended. And if you're currently the parent of a teenager, I suggest buying one copy for yourself and one for the teenager.

One reason why teenagers seldom report this kind of stories to their parents is that they don't have the information, the verbal skills, or both. I can testify that even as a teenager who wanted to become a writer, whether I was talking to my mother (very frankly), my brother (almost as frankly), my father (guardedly), my best school friend (almost as guardedly), or my private diary, I was constantly aware of not having the ability to narrate everything I remembered in a way that would communicate what I remembered. I would sit in the classroom taking notes, on students' behavior more than on the teachers' lectures, and still feel that I hadn't written down what had been going on. Parents who want to know what teenagers are up to need to understand that they're likely to be up against this lack of fluency more than they're up against secretiveness with or without reasons. My adolescent efforts to write about ninth grade life as I was living it didn't involve any big secrets--I wasn't the first to know that Jane was pregnant or John had been expelled--and mostly involved the kind of harmless, mildly entertaining school scenes you find in Paula Danziger's Pistachio Prescription, nothing like High School Confidential. But I wasn't Paula Danziger; I was fourteen, so I couldn't (yet) make them read like The Pistachio Prescription. I mention this by way of warning to parents. Reading High School Confidential may prompt your teenagers to express themselves more clearly than they've done before, but it will not give them the descriptive powers of grown-up writers.

The odds are against your teenager ever being able to write like Iversen. Few people are. But, in any case, at least you and your teenager will be able to bond by sharing laughter.

Book Review: One In One Out

Title: One In One Out

Author: S.R. Mallery

Date: 2024

Quote: "[T]he anxious mother scurried through the streets of Beijing to place her little one on their local church's front steps."

For a few years before and after the turn of the present century, China's government tried to force people to do the public-spirited thing and have one child or none. Birth control devices are only 95 to 98 percent effective; they often disappoint young people who can't afford a child, and one type is especially likely to disappoint a couple who have just had one child. So, while her daughter Huan is still a baby, Fen gives birth to another daughter she calls Ning. 

This family are not based on a specific person. Hundreds of families were in their situation. They are "typical" of one type of family who put a child up for adoption overseas. While some of these families didn't want children anyway, others wished they could keep two or more children and often thought of the children they had given up. Fen is that sort of mother. And, while some of the Chinese-American children just enjoyed being American, Ning wanted to know more about her family of origin. Easy though it is for people to be lost in a city the size of Beijing, as soon as she's old enough Ning wants to go to Beijing and search for her real mother.

This is hardly a book so much as a teaching story, aimed at readers a little younger than most of the Chinese-American children would be by now. (Most of them are legally adults.) If you are, or you have a foster or adoptive sibling who is, Chinese-American and your family are not Chinese-American, you too might want to try to find your original family. If they left clues to help you, they may want to be found. If you do find your physical relatives, you may like them. The story is very simple, perhaps overly optimistic. 

Vintage Book Review: Holiday Mountain

Title: Holiday Mountain

Author: Lloid and Juanita Jones

Date: 1949

Publisher: Westminster

ISBN: none

Length: 200 pages

Quote: “There’ll be no shortage of fun at the Campbell place...Get in thirty-five cords of wood, clear half a mile of timber for a ski trail, finish eight cabins, harvest a few hundred sacks of kinnikinnick, wind a ton or so of evergreen wreaths, and wait on the tourists in our spare time.”

That’s pretty much the plot of this story. Mr. Campbell is injured, so instead of only helping him with the “fun” of running the dude ranch as they usually do, the children have to do it all. They go to school, too. They have fun along the way. And although no 1950s novel about teenagers would have been allowed to go on for 200 pages without a Teen Romance, this was still 1949, and Holiday Mountain manages to reach a cheerful ending without a single smooch.

Is this a wild parental fantasy? I don’t think so. I remember the summer my brother and I got involved in helping relatives rebuild a house that had burned down the previous winter. His first construction job, my first teaching job, real money, plus our usual gardens to tend, errands to run, pets, chores, and of course we still wanted to be in the Summer Reading Club, in which we were competing against each other for the grand prize...best vacation we ever had. I remember, too, the special form of chronic fatigue that permeates the body of an adolescent who’s been ordered to do something for the convenience of other people...but mostly I remember the energy that surges through the same body when the same adolescent gets a chance to do real, rewarding, challenging work. We put in eighteen-hour days of what most people would have called work, and loved it. 

To balance the joy the Campbell children find in hard work, the Joneses give their characters a friend who doesn’t enjoy the work his hard-bitten aunt demands from him. Poor Les has so much “less” that he’s not even sent to school! The parents try not to be judgmental; the children use their surplus energy to help Les.

It’s not hard to see why so few libraries have kept copies of Holiday Mountain. The Campbell kids’ division of labor might be considered sexist, and it’s realistic, but not politically correct, that everyone in their neighborhood is Anglo-American. More importantly, lazy people don’t want to read about how much teenagers can accomplish, and how much they can enjoy doing it, if their time is not being consumed by TV, computers, endless chatter, “hanging out,” and Teen Romance.

If you want inspiration to unplug yourself and your family, and get things done, Holiday Mountain may still supply it. 

Book Review: Seven Biblical Insights for Healthy Joyful Christ-Centered Marriages

Title: Seven Biblical Insights for Healthy Joyful Christ-Centered Marriages

Author: Scott LaPierre

Date: 2018

Quote: "Apologize the right way."

If the basic formula for "apologizing the right way" were the only thing readers learned from this book, it would be worth whatever price the publishers put on the full-length printed book from which this little e-book was taken.

What's available through the Book Funnel is an outline of how to "apologize the right way," followed by seven suggestions about things couples are likely to want to apologize for doing and try to improve:

1. Husbands get the wives they prepare for themselves. Women tend to react to the way men behave. (This is the real reason why some women keep relationships in the friend zone: They don't feel interested in sex with men who are not positively pursuing marriage, or at least the cheap substitute known as the "long-term monogamous relationship"; so although they may have a general idea that a man could become attractive and desirable, they don't feel attraction or desire until he shows the appropriate level of commitment. LaPierre's advice to Christian couples doesn't mention this, but it's something uncoupled young men need to think about. The right kind of woman is never going to take things to the next level for you. You have to show your commitment, and you have to wait for that commitment to convince her and for her hormones to react to it. Otherwise...she may invite you to join her for lunch but, even if that doesn't mean lunch with her and half a dozen of her dorm buddies in the cafeteria, she's not likely to say anything she wouldn't say among all those other friends who, at this point, mean just as much to her as you do.)

2. Husbands need help. (Does that mean guidance and direction? Yes, but not in a bossy, controlling, infantilizing way. The last time  I visited X before writing this review, what was buzzing included a video where a sad little apple of a girl, who might or might not have been 25 years old, tearfully confessed that her husband had turned on her--he'd become a Trump fan. In cultures where marriage was seen as a matter of family obligation in which Romantic Love was optional it might not have been important, but in our culture, before couples talk about marriage they need to know enough about each other's life experience and beliefs to know whether they're making a commitment to someone who could become a Trump fan, or a Trump hater, or a Cowboys rooter, or who knows what other kind of person they didn't think they were likely to know. And if they make a commitment, they need to have some mental preparation for how they're going to deal with it. If you are not a Trump fan and your Significant Other suddenly tells you that person is one, how can you preserve love and unity while agreeing to disagree? How are you going to help your husband achieve what he wants to achieve with his life, even if you can't support some other enthusiasm he develops on the side?)

3. Husbands must make their wives supreme. (How to do this they need to ask their wives. Things like doing more housework, not discussing their feelings about Trump with their in-laws...)

4. Wives must respect their husbands. (This does not mean regressing into the "women have no civil rights, no ambitions, no lives of their own" mentality of the past...but it can mean being independent enough, if he's determined to make mistakes, to stand back and let him make them while having insulated yourself against the consequences. I had no trouble standing back and letting my husband spend some of his money on a politician who he thought couldn't lose in Maryland, which she proceeded to do. I might have had more trouble standing back and supporting his decision about hospice care if I'd examined it closely before the fact. But people have to go their own way.) 

5. Your marriage is a reflection of your relationship with Christ. (When the previous four steps are difficult, think of them as a spiritual discipline.)

6. Keep the marriage in the marriage. (Don't solicit support for your side of a disagreement from your friends and relatives. If the disagreement can't be resolved between the couple, consult a counsellor who is willing to hear both sides impartially before playing mediator. Especially avoid seeking help in a disagreement with your spouse from a friend of the opposite sex, because, even when an old school friend or favorite cousin or wise co-worker advises you to be reconciled to your spouse, person's wisdom and sympathy may tempt you to imagine that person would be a better partner for life than your spouse is. This won't help.)

7. Your body belongs to your spouse. (Don't. Ever. Cheat.)

For couples who are willing to work with these seven pieces of tough love, this book may save the expense of a lot of counselling sessions.

Book Report: Some Assembly Required

Required Reading for All Pro-Lifers

Book Title: Some Assembly Required

Author: Anne and Sam Lamott

Publisher: Penguin / Riverhead

Date: 2012

ISBN: 978-1-59448-841-2

Length: 272 pages

Quote: "The best thing--besides how unbelievably perfect Jax is, not to mention alive--is to watch Sam be a father."

Anne Lamott's first nonfiction book was Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year. A little earlier than anyone expected, the son whose infancy was described in that book was able to collaborate with Lamott on Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son. (On the inside back cover, dreadlocked blonde Anne Lamott tries to look as grandmotherly as possible.)

If you're a hardcore conservative fundamentalist type of Christian, you might say that "this," meaning premature grandmotherhood, is what Anne Lamott's liberal (in both senses--ecumenical theology and left-wing politics) approach to Christianity leads to.

If you're any kind of Christian, however, you'll have to love the way Lamott fights the urge to nag and scold her grandson's parents, forces herself to treat them as adults, and focusses on loving her grandson. And her church. And other religious people with whom she spends time during baby Jax's first year (which includes a tour in India). And Jesus.

What's not to love? As in Operating Instructions, this is an intimate, woman-to-woman book about a baby. It's hard to imagine a whole book about a baby that would not be full of moist and smelly medical details. Both of Anne Lamott's baby books bounce easily up and down, like mountain goats, from the spiritual heights ("explaining the Nicene Creed") to the cerebral ("If you try to protect [children] from hurt, and always rush to their side...they won't learn about life") to the earthy ("Is dung an element?"), and back, often within a sentence: "When I was teaching Sunday school, Jax...emerged...having opened up a little container of baby-junk-food sweet-potato bits...he had so much drool on his hands that they were sticking to him." This is Lamott's trademark, the style of writing that's put her among the bestselling Christian writers in the English-speaking world. There are those who prefer a more abstract, less earthy sort of Christian book.

However, what I've said about Lamott's other memoirs, in general, applies to this one. If you want to do something "pro-life," other than bringing up your own children, Anne Lamott can show you how it's done. No harangues. No guilt trips. Just gratitude that Jesus lives in the hearts of people who, approximately twenty years ago, promised a mixed-up young woman that they'd help her raise a child who had been produced by her sleeping with someone else's husband in exchange for drugs. And they did. And she did. And she became rich and famous by writing about it and now has money to give back to those who slipped their change into her pockets at church when she was young and poor.

I had to post something about this book here. Should have done it sooner, in fact, because Some Assembly Required was one of the first books on this site's official Amazon Wish List. Some dear, kind privacy fanatic out there made it possible for me to enjoy this book and tell youall about it. Thanks to you. Thanks to Anne and Sam Lamott, too.

Book Review: You Lied to Me about God

Title: You Lied to Me About God 

Author: Jamie Marich

Christians should read this book. It tells us so much about what not to do. 

Jamie Marich, Ph.D., is a multitalented success story you can look up online. Go ahead--read the long list of her achievements now. But don't envy her; in this memoir she tells us she's also a recovering addict. And also, she says, "Queer," self-identifying as plural in this book because sometimes she's writing for her wounded inner children. And they were wounded, she says, by spiritual abuse when her father quarrelled with her mother's church. The acrimony only seemed to increase through the messy divorce and the years of split custody. 

Spiritual abuse? What's that? Many little things, Marich says, but most memorably, it's the toxic sermon her father preached at her when her favorite teacher died. (She cried more loudly, rousing her younger brother to come out of his room and order their father to "leave my sister alone.") Their mother was Catholic; their father had become a Protestant and looked for Catholic-influenced behavior to correct when the children were with him. He even subjected them to Jimmy Swaggart's sermons and Rush Limbaugh's radio show. (Little Jamie still seems to think Limbaugh used "feminazi" to mean "feminist." In The Way Things Ought to Be Limbaugh defined "feminazi" as a woman who is glad when abortions are performed, and estimated that there were fewer than two dozen feminazis on Earth.) The brother, Paul, became a Catholic priest. 

The ill-timed sermon was unforgivable, indeed...in merely human terms. When we presume to tell people how God is going to judge other people, that misfortunes are punishments, that their lives are sure to get worse than they are now, we're lying to them about God--claiming that we know something about God that we don't know. This is a great and terrible sin. Jesus said that a man who does it to children would be better off "having a millstone round his neck, to be cast into the sea." But Christians can ask God for help to forgive such things, when God makes forgiveness possible by leading the offender to repent. Marich's father was active in his new church, and his faith seemed to bear fruit; his children had enjoyed spending time with him, mostly, and their friends enthused that they had "the best dad." And then one night in a moment of hubris "the best dad" said a few stupid words that made his children reconsider and distrust everything else he said. Had he really shared little Jamie's body image concerns as a loving parent, or used toxic body-shaming for more Freudian reasons? Had his "dates" with his children really been as wholesome as, at the time, they'd seemed?

(Tip for those who used to have "dates" or "play dates" with adults in your family: If it felt wholesome and sweet at the time, it was--at least as wholesome as fallible mortals could make it. Elders will probably always seem to the young to have defective senses of humor; that does not make us pedophiles.)

But funnily enough, Marich's symptoms of "spiritual abuse" sound exactly like the symptoms of which so many of Generation X complain. They are or feel fat. They feel depressed. They self-medicate with drugs and sex. Especially and tediously sex, because they want to believe that "sexuality" is the most important thing in their lives. They want to believe that any attempt to control their bodily urges just might kill them, that the only reason why anyone should ever fail to act on a physical attraction would be rejection, for which they'd probably need lots of expensive, addictive prescription pills to make sure they didn't (oh, the horror!) become "sexual anorexics," such as Marich claims to think St. Paul was. 

When I was young I used to think it came from being teenagers, and they'd outgrow it. Now that some of Generation X have grandchildren, I confess, friends, I am puzzled. They could outgrow it any time now, but when?

I think one of the worst abuses that was practiced on Generation X, generally, as a demographic, was allowing them to believe that "sexuality" controls people as they seem to think it does. People are meant to control their sexuality, just as we do the other body functions that are essential to our own individual survival and not merely the survival of the species. You have no control over whom and what you're attracted to, but you have full control of what you do about that attraction. Nobody has a right to blame anybody for having an appetite for food, but people can and do blame those who display bad table manners. Nobody has a right to blame anybody for feeling attracted to an act or a person, but people can and do blame those who voluntarily behave unchastely or indiscreetly.

And so...when people insist on talking about their sexual behavior, some behavior is judged more harshly than others. Marich tells us she's "Queer." Not in the sense that some woman thought she looked like a man and she responded favorably to that woman; in the sense that people carrying around resentment of their opposite-sex parents don't show the "body language" that attracts the opposite sex, and they want to blame their body shape or color or clothes when the fact is that their reactions to the opposite sex are off-putting, so things go on and on and get worse and worse unless, until, someone offers a homosexual experience. The offer might reflect the fact that an individual looks like a "boi" or simply that the person does not show all that emotional conflict every time person looks at someone of the same sex. Anyway, they accept the offer, and then they let that experience define them. They were not "born gay"; they're settling for a same-sex relationship because they're letting their damaged emotions spoil the heterosexual relationships they actually want. 

Emotional healing, like physical healing, happens at its own pace. God loves people who are seeking healing. But it would be very hard to make a case that God's will for anyone's best life is to stay stuck in this quagmire of anger, pride, and lust. 

Marich tells us that she was attracted to boys. But although high school boys may admire the girl who's at the head of every class, it's a rare high school boy who thinks he can hold his own in a conversation with that girl. Later she realizes that one of the boys on whom she had a crush had a crush on her, and they act on that attraction, but he's married someone else by now so they can have only occasional...At this point I would probably have closed the book if I hadn't been reading it on a computer. Anyway, Marich goes on to say, there were two short-term marriages, and then a woman made herself available and Marich realized that she could feel attracted to women too. 

Is that a sin? It's certainly not God's perfect will. I believe our, as in most humans', physical nature is currently discouraging us from reproducing because we live in a crowded world. Still, when that complex of old anger, guilt, resentment, shame, and fear is what's coming between you and someone you want to be with, so you're settling for someone else, I don't think it's true to claim that God made you just the way you are. You also contributed something to the way you are...something you don't like, something you would do better to clean out of your life, no matter what social pressure you may feel to "join the 'gay' community." When you've rebuilt a vibrant relationship with both of your parents and with as many parent-surrogates as you still have in this world, then you have something worth telling the world about how you have really grown up, all the way, to relate to other people.

Marich correctly says that the farce of instant one-way "forgiveness" that only functions to prevent bad situations being corrected, where people are told to accept abuse and move on, is not good for anyone and has nothing to do with what Jesus taught. That's true. What her father said, probably like some things she said to him and some things the other members of the family said to one another, is unforgivable until the one who said it repents. Only then is it obligatory, or even possible, to forgive the offender. Any people, whether connected by DNA or by "choice" or by accident, will get into this situation if they spend enough time together. Lingering resentment, refusal to forgive the person when the person has repented, gives otherwise attractive people an off-putting affect. You're not to blame if the person you find attractive thinks person is only interested in a different body type than yours, or if you're not asked for dates because young people in your community can't afford to date, or for any number of other reasons, but you are partly to blame if you lose dates by radiating resentment. 

Marich has a right to resent the people who say "I'll pray for you" with a clear implication of "...to change and be like me." I'm not so sure that she has a right to claim that her "Queer" voluntary behavior is what God wants for or from her. This is not a tell-all sex memoir, but the book does make it clear that Marich has flopped into bed with men, plural, and women, plural, in the absence of any commitment to a Partnership for Life. We call that promiscuity; the KJV calls it, well, a word that's become too rude for this website to quote, or in more detailed terms selling themselves as slaves and not even having enough sense to pick up the money. It's forgivable--the Old Testament prophets portray God begging for a chance to forgive it--but it is sin.

Should Christians be able to talk to Marich without hitting her with the message that "you just published a BOOK about how you're an open and notorious sinner!"? Of course. Should Marich be able to talk to people without saying anything about her sex life? That, too. Instead of pretending that everything is okay, even sexual abuse of students--which Marich very properly calls out, in this book--we might do better to rediscover the truth that not everything needs to be publicly discussed.

We might rediscover that, when celibacy is not something people inflict on themselves by unconsciously signalling hostility toward the opposite sex, or something caused by psychotic conditions (like some of Freud's patients) or psychopharmaceuticals (like about a third of all users of serotonin boosters), but is chosen as a spiritual discipline to be followed until a person finds a Partner for Life, celibacy is good. 

We might even let ourselves ask whether the wholesale dumping of estrogen into animals being fattened for our consumption has something to do with the increasing incidence, in each generation, of that overgrown, overstuffed capon look. A capon is a male fowl who has been neutered, and these days probably fed estrogen as well, to alter his metabolism so that he grows bigger, fatter, less muscular, than normal males of his species. As the popularity of "growth hormones" has grown, genuine childhood obesity, often combined with early puberty and also early cardiovascular diseases, has become more common in each decade; the majority of graduating classes at many schools now look like what would have been the lonely fat kid at schools my generation attended. That is one known effect of unbalanced surplus estrogen; the other is that it seems to generate estrus cycles in females that may be abnormal, unhealthy, even associated with cancer as estrogen promotes abnormal growth in all types of cells. 

Estrogen-fattened meat marinated, around the time of slaughter, in antibiotics. Chemical preservatives and processing agents in food. Glyphosate in air, food, and water. Atrazine, known to aggravate and un-balance estrogens in all bodies, on suburban lawns. Motor exhaust fumes in the air. Drugs, legal or not, prescription or over-the-counter. Formaldehyde in most non-food items. Chlorine in water. Other chemicals that have not traditionally been ingested by humans popping up in places where we're not looking for them--last year the FDA allowed food companies to market foods, from main dishes to whipped "cream," made with antifreeze as an ingredient. Propylene glycol antifreeze, the kind blamed for killing an occasional pet or toddler who finds and drinks it, as food. It's no wonder that ever increasing numbers of young people grow up fat, depressed, and addicted to sex and drugs. And, because psychologists used to be consulted by parents to "cure" children's behavior, so much of traditional psychological literature has been about what those parents could do, it's no wonder that these young people blame their parents first. Some blame is due to the parents, and some to the schools and some to the doctors and therapists and so on. Still, here's the proof, a few obnoxious words seem to produce the same effect on an adult child who was never beaten, raped, or starved that beating, rape, and starvation seem to produce on those who survived them. We have to start asking how much of the blame is due to the physical effect all this pollution has on the brain and body.

Still, Christianity keeps leading us back to the core of our faith, which is forgiveness. Any liar can say "Your sins are" (or are not) "forgiven"; in the KJV even the apostles said "Thy sins be forgiven," using "be" as the subjunctive form. We would now say "May your sins be forgiven." We should say that, perhaps more often than we do, but we are told that God's willingness to hear this prayer depends on our willingness to forgive those who repent of their sins against us. The process of forgiveness does begin with repentance. Ongoing abuses need to be addressed and stopped even in order for repentance to have meaning. 

The best memoirs are not always happy. Some writers leave the harrowing parts in. Readers seem to find Aristotle's "catharsis" in reading about chatty little Anne Frank's having to be silent all day or Richard Wright's nightmares after having killed a stray kitten. The best memoirs do, however, leave the reader with hope. Richard Wright stopped torturing animals and grew up; Anne Frank didn't grow up, but from the fact that she volunteered to work in the prison camp we know she thought she would grow up. I don't know what God's will for Jamie Marich's life may be, whether she might be called to marriage or solitude or even a lifelong bond with a girlfriend. I do know that she's about forty years old now, maybe (books aren't usually published on the day the writing is finished) fifty by now, old enough to start preparing for the half of life that comes after the sex-ridden years. 

That's a major misconception that Marich perpetuates in her book. Even Freud recognized that voluntary celibacy could "sublimate" sex energy into better things, and St. Paul was one of the world's leading examples and exponents of this truth. Marich claims that Paul disliked women; the Bible doesn't tell us whether he did or not. Only "tradition" says that Paul's marriage was unhappy and he was glad to be widowed. Paul himself tells us that he recognized a woman as his teacher, saluted other female missionaries (at least one as a full-fledged "apostle"), proclaimed that "in Christ" race and gender didn't matter, and then warned women in the church not to push the envelope of social convention too far. Marich goes so far as to diagnose Paul as a case of "sexual anorexia," which only shows how young she is. Paul was asked to write so much because of his seniority. With seniority hormone levels subside; carnal commotion quietens down. Older couples may love each other more than ever, may still allow memory to lead to a few more moments of passion, but generally feel less need to consummate that love the way they did when they were in baby-making mode. Older widows, I know firsthand, may have been passionate in youth and may now be glad that we've "been there, done that," and don't feel compelled to play the dating game again. Sexual opportunities become ways to reminisce; lack of sexual opportunities becomes, well, just the way things go. It's not anorexia. It is satisfaction. We've done what people do when they're twenty years old and moved on to what people do when they're fifty or sixty or seventy.

I wish Marich the ability to find satisfaction, and recognize it, when sexuality stops providing it even in the short-term way it does. Generally humans get about twenty-five years to enjoy being "hot." After age fifty, if we still catch the eyes of the "hot" the resulting conversations tempt us to laugh rudely rather than to flop into bed. Age forty is a wake-up call. One may look and feel as young as ever, at forty, and many people have that one last serious infatuation that might lead to True Love in their forties, but at forty one has to start preparing for the postsexual years.

All this is not to deny the value of Marich's work with addicts, or her creative work--but this book has little to say about her work with addicts or even about her recovery experience. Those were the topics of other books. This is the book about how angry she still feels at her parents and how badly she allowed that to affect her young-adult life. 

It affected her faith, too. Though she still confesses belief in Jesus, Marich also left the Catholic church and then left a few yoga groups. She quotes an American "yogi" who taught that the spiritual truth is the part all the different religions have in common; everything else is "just details" and may or may not be true. And since the Bible doesn't claim to contain all the truth there is in this world (think about it: the Bible says nothing at all about raising tomatoes!), maybe some things the Bible plainly says are untruth, too. And so when asked to serve as a mediator between homosexuals and their conservative Christian families, she always demands that the Christians concede the demands of the homosexual lobby first...

Ah, yes. "Whatever we do not forgive, we are doomed one day to live," counsellors used to say in the 1970s. Marich probably would feel indignant if her demands that traditional Catholics celebrate homosexual behavior were compared with her father's demand that the rest of her family stop praying to Mother Mary. People with that sort of emotional complex usually do. Madeleine L'Engle had a character, though drunk, realize what she was doing and scream at her long-dead father's picture, "Pa, I'm just like you, damn you!" 

I think Marich needed to write this book, and to discuss every chapter with her family in family counselling sessions. Her parents need to express penitence to her. Based on personal experience (I had grievances with my parents, too, and know the benefits of reconciliation) I'd guess that Marich has some repentance to do, too. If Christian families sincerely ask for the grace of reconciliation and not the selfish pleasure of scoring points off one another, reconciliation will be given them. Marich should give that experience five or ten years to happen and bear fruit in her life. Then she should publish the story of how that worked. Then she'll probably recognize that this book has value...as an indicator of how far she's come, how far she's needed to come.