Thomas Cowan

Commonsense Childrearing

Can we raise healthy children in a toxic world? Yes, we can Modern life, with its conveniences and technologies, has had mixed results. With great gains come also losses. For better or for worse, as certain types of knowledge have increased, others, which were not perhaps knowledge in the modern sense, but rather types of wisdom, which were once innate, have grown faint. Just as the wisdom of traditional diets faded and gave way to a haphazard, increasingly toxic, industrialized, "modern" diet--the hazardous results of which many are now waking up to--so, too, did older, likely innate wisdom for guiding a growing human being from birth through childhood and adolescence into adulthood all but vanish, with predictable results. It falls to those who are willing to step outside the box of today's widely unquestioned orthodoxies to honestly assess where we've come from, where we are, and how to go forward in ways that not only restore sanity (though that's a necessary first step), but also reclaim something of the wisdom of being human, but in new ways. While it's true that we can't go back to how things once were, wisdom is also possible going forward. A living, contemporary, and conscious approach to raising children, born of both commonsense and love, is both achievable and necessary. This is the path that Dr. Cowan outlines in this book. With friendly humor and out of his keen observation of children through the years, as a physician, a parent, grandparent, and friend, Dr. Cowan offers hope and guidance for the parents of today's youngest generation, that they may raise up a cohort of free, healthy, happy, caring human beings. While rearing children in the twenty-first century entails facing certain challenges that were either unknown or insignificant even a generation ago, Dr. Cowan demonstrates that the door is wide open to meet these challenges with new thinking and a renewed commitment to the sacredness of the growing human being.