Synopses & Reviews
A witty and insightful report from the parenting trenches by the mother of two "adultescents"
Millions of American parents sit down to dinner every night, wondering why fully grown children are joining them—or, more likely, grunting good-bye as they head out for another night of who knows what. Sally Koslow, a journalist, novelist, and mother of two "adultescents" digs deep to reveal what lies behind the current generation’s unwillingness—or inability—to take flight.
By delving into the latest research and conducting probing interviews with both frustrated parents and their frustrated offspring, Koslow uses humor, insight, and honest self-reflection to give voice to the issues of prolonged dependency. From the adultescent’s relationship to work (or no work), money (that convenient parental ATM), or social life, Slouching Toward Adulthood is a provocative, razor-sharp, but heartfelt cri de coeur for all the parents who sent their kids to college only to have them ricochet home with a diploma in one hand and the DVR remote in the other.
Review
“Excellent…. At last, a serious, well-researched book about raising children which also includes that crucial characteristic every parent needs—a sense of humor.” —Deirdre Donahue,
USA Today
“An eye-opener…. Koslow writes wittily about the infantilization of American youth as increasing numbers treat getting a job and moving out as just an option.” —People
“Smart, with plenty of insights and a lively prose style that should keep readers, especially the book's target audience of parents wondering why their grown-up kids are back living in their basements, engaged.” —Booklist
“Koslow casts a keen eye on the 'not-so-empty-nest' phenomenon that besets today's baby boomer parents . . . and provides plenty of food for thought for parents and adultescents who want to understand each other and perhaps change things for the better.” —Publishers Weekly
“This book is hilarious! I burst out laughing on page one, and it just got funnier and funnier. But Slouching Toward Adulthood is also hard-hitting and painfully insightful—I found myself wincing with recognition. Backed by the latest research, Sally Koslow's thought-provoking new book should be required reading for today's parents and young adults.” —Amy Chua, professor of law at Yale University and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
“Full of research, insight, and hilarious examples of what life is like for the long-suffering parents of 'adultescents,' Slouching Toward Adulthood is one of those invaluable books that identifies and illuminates a new phenomenon in our culture.” —Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project
“Sally Koslow has really hit on something with her incisive Slouching Toward Adulthood. Memorable books that struck a chord about the path of life or the dissonance between parent and child—Gail Sheehy's Passages, Nancy Friday's My Mother/My Self—all had a kind of kitchen-table humanity and an ability to limn the unnamed conflicts of a particular moment. Beneath its jaunty two-drinks-with-your-coolest-friend ebullience, this book, as of its moment as those books were of theirs, has that resonance, too.” —Sheila Weller, author of Girls Like Us
“Let go, Sally Koslow exhorts indulgent parents who lovingly enable their adultescents to postpone the rigors and responsibilities of being a grown-up. Koslow's wit and wisdom wake us up to the hidden costs of hanging on too long to our kids, to our youth, and to the past. A great read!” —Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted
“In her trenchant book on twenty-first-century life with our adult children, Sally Koslow offers us wit, awareness, and, most important, a sense that we are not alone. From the first pages, the reader feels right at home, comforted by Koslow's confessions, research, and wisdom.” —Susan Shapiro Barash, author of You’re Grounded Forever . . . But First Let’s Go Shopping
“Sally Koslow has written a funny, shrewd, and true account of a problem the boomer generation didn't know it had created: the consequences of helicopter parenting. We've pampered our kids so much they don't want to grow up. Who can blame them? Slouching Toward Adulthood is the book that explains why 'the guest bedroom' is a thing of the past.” —James Atlas, author of My Life in the Middle Ages
Review
Must Read for November 2012
-Oprah Magazine
"The fullest guide through this territory...a densely researched report on the state of middle-class young people today."
-The New Yorker
“Provocative information presented compellingly”
-Kirkus
“With humor and insight, the authors deftly volley commentary and observation across the generation gap”
-Publishers Weekly
“In this provocative, comprehensive, and often very funny examination of the phenomenon of 'twentysomething,' Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig provide the perspective of two generations on this new stage of life. Anyone who is twentysomething, is related to a twentysomething, or works with a twentysomething, will want to read this book." —Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project
“Parents will love this fascinating, fact-packed mother-daughter dialogue, and so will their 'emerging adult' sons and daughters. If you think today's young people are another species entirely, you've forgotten way too much about your own early struggles and screwups.” —Katha Pollitt, author of Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories
“Losing sleep because you think your grown kids are behaving like the characters in the HBO series, 'Girls'? Twentysomething will calm your nerves. Smart, well-researched, down-to-earth and lively, this mother-daughter collaboration is chock full of important insight into the newest generation coming of age.”
—Jane Isay, author of Walking on Eggshells and Mom Still Likes You Best
“Mixing rigorous empirical evidence, testimony from twentysomethings themselves, and the astute observations of a mother and her twentysomething daughter, this insightful and engaging book shows us that sound bites and slogans are just not up to the task of capturing life as it being lived by young adults. Highly recommended!" —Barry Schwartz, Ph.D. author of The Paradox of Choice and Practical Wisdom
“If you want to understand young people in the decade after college graduation—their anxiety about work and relationships, intensity of friendships, and feelings of drive and dislocation—this book is the perfect guide. Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig weave the relevant research into an entertaining narrative, and their mother-daughter patter is a pure delight.” —Emily Bazelon, author of Sticks and Stones: The New Problem of Bullying and How To Solve It
Review
Praise for Slouching Toward Adulthood:
“Excellent. … At last, a serious, well-researched book about raising children which also includes that crucial characteristic every parent needs—a sense of humor.”
—USA Today, "Top Summer Nonfiction Pick"
“‘Our offspring have simply leveraged our braggadocio, good intentions, and overinvestment, Koslow writes in her new book, Slouching Toward Adulthood. They inhabit ‘a broad savannah of entitlement that weve watered, landscaped, and hired gardeners to maintain. She recommends letting the grasslands revert to forest: ‘The best way for a lot of us to show our love would be to learn to un-mother and un-father.”
—Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker
“An eye-opener. . . . Koslow writes wittily about the infantilization of American youth as increasing numbers treat getting a job and moving out as just an option.”
—People
“This book is hilarious! I burst out laughing on page one, and it just got funnier and funnier. But Slouching Toward Adulthood is also hard-hitting and painfully insightful—I found myself wincing with recognition. Backed by the latest research, Sally Koslow's thought-provoking new book should be required reading for today's parents and young adults.”
—Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
“There's a Koslow in all of us who wants to strangle Hannah, the character played by Lena Dunham in the popular HBO show Girls, when we learn that her parents had been subsidizing her life in New York City while she worked at an unpaid internship and pursued a writing career. . . . Koslow criticizes clueless parents as much as their narcissistic offspring. She argues that babying adult children tends to yield entitled progeny who can't launch their way into the conventional phases of adulthood. Koslow offers excellent advice, which makes this book worth reading to the end.”
—Fortune
“Smart, with plenty of insights and a lively prose style that should keep readers, especially the book's target audience of parents, wondering why their grown-up kids are back living in their basements, engaged.”
—Booklist
“A witty, provocative study that examines why so many millennials can't seem to launch into adulthood and now find themselves ‘wandering—if not literally, then psychically.' . . . Observant and bracingly candid.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Sally Koslow has written a funny, shrewd, and true account of a problem the boomer generation didn't know it had created: the consequences of helicopter parenting. We've pampered our kids so much they don't want to grow up. Who can blame them? Slouching Toward Adulthood is the book that explains why 'the guest bedroom' is a thing of the past.”
—James Atlas, author of My Life in the Middle Ages
“Koslow casts a keen eye on the 'not-so-empty-nest' phenomenon that besets today's baby boomer parents . . . and provides plenty of food for thought for parents and adultescents who want to understand each other and perhaps change things for the better.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Full of research, insight, and hilarious examples of what life is like for the long-suffering parents of ‘adultescents, Slouching Toward Adulthood is one of those invaluable books that identifies and illuminates a new phenomenon in our culture.”
—Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project
“Sally Koslow has really hit on something with her incisive Slouching Toward Adulthood. Memorable books that struck a chord about the path of life or the dissonance between parent and child—Gail Sheehy's Passages, Nancy Friday's My Mother/My Self—all had a kind of kitchen-table humanity and an ability to limn the unnamed conflicts of a particular moment. Beneath its jaunty two-drinks-with-your-coolest-friend ebullience, this book, as of its moment as those books were of theirs, has that resonance, too.”
—Sheila Weller, author of Girls Like Us
“The helicopter parent has crashed and burned. With millennials reaching adulthood it has become clear that this hovering style of parenting results in overly dependent young adults, plagued by depression or less satisfaction with their lives and anxiety, who cannot even face the workplace without the handholding their parents have led them to expect. . . . Sally Koslow [has] documented a generation so cosseted that they have lost the impetus to grow up or leave home. The over-involved parent has gone from paragon of caring to a figure of fun.”
—Lisa Endlich Heffernan, The Atlantic
Synopsis
The helicopter parent has crashed and burned. . . . Sally Koslow [has] documented a generation so cosseted that they have lost the impetus to grow up or leave home. The over-involved parent has gone from paragon of caring to a figure of fun.” Lisa Endlich Heffernan, The Atlantic
Parents once dreamed of dropping their prodigies at first-choice colleges and sighing with relief at a job well done. Nowadays, though, mothers and fathers are stressing about whether Jessica or Josh will boomerang back after graduationand still be there years later. Why are so many wunderkinds now s-l-o-w-l-y slouching toward adulthood? Panicked after reading that twenty-eight is the new nineteen, Sally Koslowjournalist and mothersearched for answers. Part hard-hitting investigation and part hilarious memoir, Slouching Toward Adulthood is a heartfelt cri de coeur that can help families negotiate life around the unexpectedly crowded dining tables for years to come.
Synopsis
A mother-daughter writing team reports on whats really up with kids today
Science writer Robin Marantz Henig and her daughter, journalist Samantha Henig, off er a smart, comprehensive look at what its really like to be twentysomethingand to what extent its di erent for Millennials than it was for their Baby Boomer parents. Th e Henigs combine the behavioral science literature for insights into how young people make choices about schooling, career, marriage, and childbearing; how they relate to parents, friends, and lovers; and how technology both speeds everything up and slows everything down. Packed with oft en-surprising discoveries, Twentysomething is a two-generation conversation that will become the definiftive book on being young in our time.
Th e fullest guide through this territory . . . A densely researched report on the state of middleclass young people today, drawn from several data sources and filtered through a comparative lens.” The New Yorker
About the Author
Sally Koslow is a journalist, and an author, and the former editor in chief of both McCall’s and Lifetime. She has written for O, The Oprah Magazine; More; Real Simple; Ladies Home Journal; Good Housekeeping; Reader’s Digest; and Huffington Post. She lives in New York City with her husband; her kids have finally moved out.