Life under compulsion: ten ways to destroy the humanity of your child

How do you raise a child who can sit with a good book and read? Who is moved by beauty? Who doesn’thaveto buy the latest this or that vanity? Who is not bound to the instant urge, wherever it may be found? 

As a parent, you’ve probably asked these questions. And now Anthony Esolen provides the answers in this wise new book, the eagerly anticipated follow-up to his acclaimedTen Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child.

Esolen reveals that our children are becoming slaves to compulsions. Some compulsions comefrom without: government mandates that determine what children are taught, how they are taught, and even what they can eat in school. Others comefrom within: the itches that must be scratched, the passions by which children (like the rest of us) can be mastered.

Common Core, smartphones, video games, sex ed, travel teams, Twitter, politicians, popular music, advertising, a world with more genders than there are flavors of ice cream—these and many other aspects of contemporary life come under Esolen’s sweeping gaze inLife Under Compulsion. 

This elegantly written book restores lost wisdom about education, parenting, literature, music, art, philosophy, and leisure. Esolen shows why the common understanding of freedom—as a permission slip to do as you please—is narrow, misleading, and dangerous. He draws on great thinkers of the Western tradition, from Aristotle and Cicero to Dante and Shakespeare to John Adams and C. S. Lewis, to remind us what human freedomtrulymeans.
 
Life Under Compulsionalso restates the importance of concepts so often dismissed today: truth, beauty, goodness, love, faith, and virtue. But above all else, it reminds us of a fundamental truth: that a child is ahuman being.
 
Countercultural in the best sense of the term,Life Under Compulsionis an indispensable guide for any parent who wants to help a child remove the shackles and enjoy a truly free and full life.