Trauma-Proofing Your Kids, by Peter Levine and Maggie Kline

How to raise emotionally healthy kids.

I'm sorry but I thought this was bad. Basically:

1) there is absolutely no acknowledgement of trade-offs, challenges or the reason things currently default to being the-way-they-are-now. The chapter about what to do during a divorce is instructive -- the authors tell us that if you're divorcing you should prioritise the kids, co-operate with your ex-spouse, maintain stability for the kids (e.g. keep them in the same house and school and rotate yourselves around that)

This is stupid, in the sense that it seems a) obviously good if you can do that, but b) not the actual dilemma/tradeoff/choice that normal people normally face. A book like this is only useful if it can tell you something that is within your actual choice-set but not the thing you would have done otherwise; if it just tells you platitudes that ignore the whole reason you're having problems in the first place, it's just masturbation/self-aggrandisement for the authors.

Actually, this suggests a pretty good test for such books: they should have to include multiple scenarios where they say "in this situation, [other prominent person/school of thought] would say you should X, but in fact you should Y [where Y is a thing you could practically, meaningfully, reasonably do with the monetary/emotional/psychological resources that a normal person has]."

But this would highlight that e.g. nobody thinks it's "good" in the abstract to shout at your ex in front of your kids! Nobody thinks it's "good" to be in a long protracted battle where you use your kids as a pawn in a legal battle and keep your child away from THAT WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT before they INFECT your precious darling with their RAGING NARCISSISM. You do this because either

a) you've got to a point where you truly believe that your ex is a reincarnation of satan, and that fighting to keep them away from your kids is a necessary lesser evil, or
b) you're so blinded by hate for your ex that you don't notice you're fucking up your kids in the process of fighting them.

Levine and Kline's advice is not helpful in either of these cases!

2) any book like this should be legally obliged to include long, anonymous input from the people who have actually been subject to these Experts' techniques, and whether it actually worked for them. I want the kids who were raised with this method to write a chapter expressing whether or not The System led to them growing up emotionally healthy and trauma-free. Maybe it did! But what we have in the book is just these experts telling us anecdotes about how phenomenally well their methods work, and I want to hear what the actual subjects thought.

[Content warning for sexual abuse in families coming up....]

The one specific thing I will actually remember from this book is the claim that most sexual abuse in families is actually by siblings, not parents. [I need to fact check this, but that's what the book says]. What the book doesn't say, I think because it's taboo to talk about, is if/that most of this sexual abuse is by step-siblings, rather than biological siblings. Basically, (my understanding is that) there is an absolute epidemic of sexual assault through step-families, and that in our collective social desire not to shame step-families we don't really talk about this, or don't break out the statistics in such a way as to make this clear, and so on. I always assumed that this epidemic was about step-fathers abusing their step-children, but this book's claim suggests the possibility that it might in fact be step-brothers, which.... would be good to know, I guess?, though I'm not sure what specifically to do with it.

Overall, if the problem of sexual abuse in step-families is anything like as big as I understand it to be then it's one of those social issues that I think (hope?) future generations will absolutely hate us for, and that I wish I had the guts to talk about publicly, but don't because it steps on people's toes and I'm (somehow) too scared to step on toes even when I think truly terrible things are happening.