Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
Audiobook11 hours
Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting
Written by Jennifer Traig
Narrated by Emily Woo Zeller
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
()
About this audiobook
From a distinctive, inimitable voice, a wickedly funny and fascinating romp through the strange and often contradictory history of Western parenting
Why do we read our kids fairy tales about homicidal stepparents? How did helicopter parenting develop if it used to be perfectly socially acceptable to abandon your children? Why do we encourage our babies to crawl if crawling won’t help them learn to walk?
These are just some of the questions that came to Jennifer Traig when—exhausted, frazzled, and at sea after the birth of her two children—she began to interrogate the traditional parenting advice she’d been conditioned to accept at face value. The result is Act Natural, a hilarious and deft dissection of the history of Western parenting, written with the signature biting wit and deep insights Traig has become known for.
Moving from ancient Rome to Puritan New England to the Dr. Spock craze of mid-century America, Traig cheerfully explores historic and present-day parenting techniques ranging from the misguided, to the nonsensical, to the truly horrifying. Be it childbirth, breastfeeding, or the ways in which we teach children how to sleep, walk, eat, and talk, she leaves no stone unturned in her quest for answers: Have our techniques actually evolved into something better? Or are we still just scrambling in the dark?
Author
Jennifer Traig
Jennifer Traig is the author of Devil in the Details and Well Enough Alone, and the editor of The Autobiographer’s Handbook and Don’t Forget to Write. She holds a PhD in English from Brandeis, and lives with her family in Michigan.
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Reviews for Act Natural
Rating: 4.299999953333333 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
15 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Occasionally bogs down in the historical details, but then the snark pulls it out. Almost certainly funnier to parents, but probably a good read for everyone.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It's quite a long tome--I kept checking how many pages it had and was surprised that it was only 350 or so! The author could've stopped after Chapter 3 and sufficiently made her point. I'm impressed with the amount of research the author has done on this subject. Her humor is funny...but a bit too flippant, ceaseless/relentless, and irritating. But sometimes it hits my funny bone.Great book to make one realize that parenting advice can be completely BS!