num_pages: 232
description: Told from a father's perspective, The Withering Child is the story of a young boy's profound reaction to the disruptive forces of change. John A. Gould's artful narrative of a domestic crisis aptly gauges the subjective undercurrents of contemporary family life. Indeed, parents who read it will confront facets of their own - and their children's - expectations and apprehensions.In August 1990, Gould, his wife, Jane, and their two children, five-and-a-half-year-old Gardner and sixteen-month-old Sam, left their home in Massachusetts for a yearlong stay in England. For the Goulds (he, a teacher and scholar, and she, an Episcopal priest) it was to have been a long-awaited, working sabbatical. Ten harrowing weeks later, they left England. In so short a time, Gardner had developed anorexia and had lost a third of his body weight. The Goulds came home, essentially, to save his life.Gardner had always been a "handful" - capable and caring, but often willful, inattentive, and overly energetic. When the Goulds departed for England, the child relinquished the familiar people, places, and things that had afforded stability and comfort. The losses overwhelmed him. Once in England, Gardner's emotional fuse shortened steadily, and his typical enthusiasm waned. Worse still, as soon as he entered his new school, the boy fell into a pattern of fasting and vomiting. Weakened further by sleeplessness and cramps, Gardner appeared to wither before his parents' eyes.Gould writes of their dogged adherence to family routines as he and his wife sought help for their troubled son. Fighting off misgivings that they were being manipulated by a selfish child, they often escaped into their work and all but welcomed preoccupation by lesser problems. In this melange of evasion and confrontation, guilty acquiescence engendered bitter standoffs. Then, late one afternoon, in what evoked a deathbed bequeathal, the exhausted child stirred from a nap long enough to hand a favorite toy to his father...
language: English
title: The Withering Child
titlecomplete: The Withering Child
genres: Nonfiction
ratings_count: 4
publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr