Bea Reviews The Myth of the Spoiled Child by Alfie Kohn

Publisher: Beacon Press
Source: the publisher in exchange for an honest review
Release Date: March 8, 2016
Challenges: NetGalley & Edelweiss Reading Challenge
Buying Links: Amazon* | Book Depository* | OmniLit* (different edition)  | iTunes* (different edition) | Barnes & Noble
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Blurb from goodreads:

Somehow, deeply conservative assumptions about how children behave and how parents raise them have become the conventional wisdom in our society. It’s widely assumed that parents are both permissive and overprotective, unable to set limits and afraid to let their kids fail. We’re told that young people receive trophies, praise, and A’s too easily, and suffer from inflated self esteem and insufficient self-discipline. However, complaints about pushover parents and entitled kids are actually decades old and driven, it turns out, by ideology more than evidence.

With the same lively, contrarian style of Alfie Kohn’s bestselling books about rewards, competition, and traditional education, The Myth of the Spoiled Child systematically debunks the story that we hear with numbing regularity. Kohn uses humor, logic, and his familiarity with a vast range of social science data to challenge media-stoked fears of spoiling our children. He reveals that the major threat to healthy child development isn’t parents who are too indulgent but those who are too controlling.

I Have A New Job! Squeeeeee!!!!

No, I'm not giving up teaching. Or blogging, though really that's volunteer work. No, I have a new part-time job. For almost 18 years I taught full-time and worked in retail part-time. Then the store I worked in closed and I was laid off. I found that I didn't really miss it all that much, though my bank account did. I did notice that my health problems improved and so did my doctors (and my co-workers at school), so I held off actively looking for a new part-time job.

Not working 50-60 hours a week gave me time to start the blog and start reviewing. As regular readers know, one of my pet peeves in books is the quality of the proof reading and copy editing. A few errors are to be expected; no matter how many eyes look it over, something is bound to slip through. But more than a few and I start getting cranky - the wrong word used (don't even get me started on the recent trend in using "imaged" for "imagined" Grrrrr), a word left out, typos, misspellings, lack of punctuation, etc. The more of that junk there is, the more it takes me out of the story. I note in my reviews when the typos, etc go over my tolerance threshold. There have been several books that were so badly done that I swore they had been edited by a blind, drunk monkey.

Recently, I received an email from the publisher of one of those blind, drunk monkey books. She apologized for the quality of the book, commented on my detailing of the errors, and offered me a job as a copy editor. I thought about it, made a few inquiries, and said if she had an opening for a part-timer, I was interested. She was agreeable and sent out a contract. The contract has been signed and returned, and I am now a freelance part-time copy editor. Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

I am excited and nervous and annoyingly hyper. Several of my tweeps and my co-workers at school were very supportive and encouraging as I contemplated this new venture and I am very appreciative. I <3 you guys.

So, now I'm just waiting for my first assignment, and hoping that I'm as good at this as I think I am. :)

(Dear deity, how many errors in my post did I fail to catch despite proofing it four times? Do I even want to know? :P) (ETA: Ha! I found one and fixed it. :D)