Life Under Compulsion By Anthony Esolen

How to Raise Kids Who Can Resist Today's 
Life Under Compulsion

New Book Shows Parents How to Give Children Solid Foundations in an Increasingly Hostile Culture

  

"Esolen signals with this book his presence in the top rank of authors of cultural criticism."

--The American Spectator

How do you raise a child who can sit with a good book and read? ...who doesn't have to buy the latest gadget? ...who is not bound to the instant urge, wherever it may be found? Thoughtful parents everywhere ask these kinds of questions but struggle to find answers. But now the acclaimed author Anthony Esolen shows the way in his new book, the eagerly anticipated follow-up to his influential Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child.

In Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child, Esolen targets how contemporary life harms our children--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, and much more. We always talk about "freedom," all the while we're raising children who are slaves to compulsions.

Esolen reveals ten ways to destroy the humanity of your child:

1. Keep children kenneled up in a school where they learn to be content with "life under compulsion"
2. Ignore the true meaning of education and reduce it all to training children in meaningless "skills"
3. Turn childhood into nothing more than preparation for a dull, lim­ited adulthood focused only on work
4. Reduce language to Orwellian doublespeak that keeps them from thinking
5. In the name of "freedom" and "choice," celebrate lusts, not love
6. Insist that we should not judge anyone--but then judge harshly anyone deemed "intolerant"
7. Ignore history except to justify your favored cause as "inevitable"
8. Sever ties to home and put as much distance as possible between parents and children
9. Teach kids to be comfortable in the mob--to look, think, and act like everyone else
10. Deny the transcendent

Life Under Compulsion is an indispensable guide for any parent who wants to help a child break free from the shackles and enjoy a truly free and full life. It restores lost wisdom about education, parenting, literature, music, art, philosophy, and leisure. Esolen 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 freedom truly means: truth, beauty, goodness, love, faith, and virtue.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anthony Esolen is the author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization. He is also the translator and editor of the celebrated three-volume Modern Library edition of Dante's Divine Comedy. He is a professor of English at Providence College and a senior editor of Touchstone magazine.