Under Pressure Paperback by Carl Honore

Product Details

• Publisher: Vintage Canada (2009-03-03)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 304 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780676978438
• Item Weight: 272.16 grams
• Dimensions: 8.0 x 5.2 x 0.8 cm

From the bestselling author of In Praise of Slow comes a fascinating and urgent look at childhood today and how we are raising a generation of overprogrammed, overachieving, exhausted children.

For generations of children, growing up was a pretty simple business: you went to school for a few hours a day, you dabbled in hobbies and sports, and the rest of the time you played. Or maybe you just day-dreamed. Carl Honoré explains how our modern approach to children is backfiring: our kids are fatter, more myopic, more injured, more depressed and more medicated than any previous generation. By using children as a way to relive our own lives, or as a way to make up for our personal shortcomings, we have destroyed the magic and innocence of childhood. Under Pressure is not a parenting manual but a call to action; we must do better for our children.

Using fascinating anecdotes about obsessive parents (including one about the father of a tennis player who drugged all his child’s opponents), solid research and personal insight, Honoré explains the over-parenting phenomenon, dispels myths and rallies for change in clear and persuasive prose. Topics explored include the use of technology as babysitting, how enrolling children in hours of extracurriculars every week can do more harm than good and how we underestimate the resilience of our children at the expense of their freedom.

About the Author

Canadian-born journalist CARL HONORÉ has written for The Economist, the Houston Chronicle, the Observer, and the National Post, but he is best known for his advocacy of the Slow Movement. A loose and international effort by the harried and haggard to decelerate the pace of their lives, the Slow Movement spans everything from telecommunications (slow e-mail) and health care (slow medicine) to diet (slow food) and public space (slow cities). In Praise of Slow has been translated into well over twenty languages. Carl's TED Talk on the subject has been viewed by more than 2.5 million people. He is also the author of Under Pressure: Putting the Child Back in Childhood and The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter and Live Better.