Mix with that a feeling of dread that we might just be raising the kid who shows up at high school and guns down his or her classmates, and you've got a recipe for ongoing anxiety and confusion. The people who position and market parenting books know this recipe well. Good parents, smart parents, know this and, when faced with all the books out there, may feel that if they don't make use of them, they're being a bad parent. Just the existence of so many books makes a parent feel as if a simple, strong relationship with his child isn't enough, that it needs to be shored up by all this outside opinion. Which brings us to the crushing presence of the media in all its forms, as well as the marketing of baby doctors and child psychologists as celebrities.
Experts are nothing new, but never have experts been so beguiling.
They're not movie stars, but the kind of doctors and psychologists who write books and work hard to promote them tend to have movie-star personalities. It's all very seductive. Before we became enamored of science and scientists in the 20th century, preachers and poets routinely weighed in on the correct way to raise kids. In those days, you went either with the flow or against it. Only recently have schools of thought on raising children become a commodity, something to be consumed.