Home Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Wonder Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes by Mary Eberstadt. Sentinel, 2004. $25.95 — 218 pp.

Give me just a second, everybody. Let me get ready for this one. Hand me that body armor and helmet, will you? Yes, I’ll take the plexiglass shield and the padded gloves. Throw in some shoulder pads, some hobnailed boots, a mouthpiece, and some safety glasses.

Now that I’m properly dressed, I’ll keep my head down, take my chances, and give a favorable review to Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Wonder Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes.

Home-Alone America attempts to answer the question found on the fly-leaf of the book, namely, What do today’s unprecedented numbers of absent parents really mean for children? Author Mary Eberstadt answers that question by looking at certain topics and the data we have on those topics: the millions of American children who every year take behavior-control drugs; the millions of children who battle obesity; the hundreds of thousands of teens who contract sexually transmitted diseases; the teen music that bitterly and repeatedly attacks the broken families that litter our national landscape in numbers never before seen in any society.

To raise any of these issues is to arouse the ire of a number of groups — single women, abandoned women, divorced couples, working couples, damn near everybody, in fact. Parents don’t like being told that they may be the chief cause of their children’s afflictions. We have become a society that likes to point long, quavering fingers of blame at everyone but ourselves. We blame MacDonald’s for the weight of our children. We blame televison for adolescent passivity and ignorance. We blame music for teenage rebellion. We blame the hectic pace of our lives for forcing us to sedate our own children.

We blame, in short, everyone but ourselves.

Now we have Home-Alone America staring us in the face, a passionate book analyzing a score of different studies of modern childhood, a book of anecdotes and cold statistics, a book that acts as a mirror for those who are really responsible for our afflicted youth. We open the book and find the culprit inside staring up at us from each page. The greatest enemy of a blissful childhood these days is the parent — more precisely, the absent parent.

Mary Eberstadt doesn’t mince words in Home-Alone America. To her readers she points out repeatedly that many of our children are the victims of parental inattention and absence, that many of our teenagers live lives almost entirely separate from those of their parents, that in many households children and parents have become strangers who share living quarters and a refrigerator.

Before you hurl the first stone at me, you single parents and unwed mothers, let me assure you that Mary Eberstadt understands your plight. She knows that many single parents are gallant folk who quite literally break themselves trying to earn a living and hold their families together. She isn’t criticizing the individual mom or dad who has made a success of single-parenting, but she is attacking the cumulative effect of absent parents on an entire generation of children and on our society. She writes: “We need to replace our current low moral bar regarding nurture with a more humane standard acknowledging that individuals and society would be better off if more parents spent more time with their children” (italics in original).

Eberstadt makes a fine point here, but I think she might have advocated her ideas of change even more effectively by suggesting that parents not only spend more time with their children, but that those same parents also begin acting more like grown-ups. It isn’t enough for parents to spend time with their children, hauling them to soccer games and dance lessons; children would also benefit, I contend, if parents actually behaved more like adults when they were with their children.

How do adults behave?

Well, they don’t dress like Britney Spears, their drug of choice is an occasional aspirin, and they’re comfortable answering “Because I said so” when confronted with a recalcitrant 3-year-old. Adults, in case anyone has forgotten, once dominated our landscape; they were those large people in slightly funny clothes who used to wear the sort of burdened look on their faces that comes from making tough decisions, usually about their children.

Often we lay the blame for the failure of our children on the schools. For 50 years we have heard how inadequate our schools are, how badly trained our teachers are, how much better our students would be if we just spent another billion dollars on education or added computers to all the classrooms or reduced class size.

Let me tell you the dirty little secret of our school system. Our teachers are for the most part dedicated human beings trying hard to do a good job. Our school administrators are for the most part people trying to do a good job. Our classrooms and buildings and equipment are more than adequate to the demands of education. It’s not the schools that are a mess — it’s some of the kids, and those kids are a mess because their parents are a mess. The worst of these parents end up with DSS; the others simply raise kids who are careless of their time, their lives, and the lives and concerns of others. And if you think I’m talking only about lower-income families, lift your head out of the sand and take a look around.

Home-Alone America is a call for real change in the way we raise our young people. This call is not addressed to the government or to the churches. It is not addressed to the pharmaceutical companies or the entertainment world or the fast-food industries. This call is addressed to parents.

We would do well to heed it.

(Jeff Minick is a teacher and writer who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com.)