THE CHILDREN WE DESERVE, Rosalind Miles, HarperCollins $84 CHILDREN of the modern world, we are told time and again, are spinning out of control. Newspapers are full of the stories - crack dealers aged 14; child-mothers of 12; murderers aged 10.
In Britain, fears boiled over in 1993 when security cameras caught the image of two 10-year-old boys leading toddler James Bulger away from his mother's side, out of a shopping centre, on his way to a gruesome murder. Rosalind Miles, author of Women and Power and The Rites of Man: Love, Sex and Death in the Making of the Male, has joined the debate, with the Bulger tragedy as her starting point.
But in her latest book she does not blame the children. She calls for parents to recognise that children are not born delinquent but are made so by parental and society's failings.
Miles makes an impassioned argument, backed up by hundreds of examples from the lives of the famous and not so famous, as well as quotes from poetry, literature, celebrities and academic reports.
Before we become parents we must make sure we can be good ones. If not our children will pay the price in varying degrees of unhappiness and delinquency. We need not be surprised that children brought up in violent and unstable homes are more likely to be violent themselves, or those whose parents have divorced are more likely to divorce themselves. But Miles points to much wider wrongs to our children, with virtually all parents failing in one way or another.
She argues that in exercising our own greater freedom to self-determination, we do not pay adequate heed to our children's needs. Mothers who pursue careers will brush off their youngsters' feelings of rejection or the inadequacy of the child care arranged to take her place. Parents who divorce or move in with another partner fool themselves that the children will soon adjust to the change in the family order.
