Just Another Ape?
Societas, September 2010
by Helene Guldberg
‘Helene Guldberg has done us all a favour in this lucid account of the many failings and false premises of the protracted research programme to demonstrate the intellectual continuity between ourselves and our primate cousins’.
James Le Fanu, author of ‘Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves’
‘an eloquent and well argued case’
Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist
‘An essential antidote to our narcissistic over-identification with our fellow apes’.
Jeremy Taylor, author of Not a Chimp
Today, the belief that human beings are special is distinctly out of fashion. Almost every day we are presented with new revelations about how animals are so much more like us than we ever imagined. The argument is at its most powerful when it comes to our closest living relatives - the great apes. This book argues that whatever first impressions might tell us, apes are really not ‘just like us’. Science has provided strong evidence that the boundaries between us and other
species are vast.
Unless we hold on to the belief in our exceptional abilities we will never be able to envision or build a better future - in which case, we might as well be monkeys.
September 2010: Pb: 978-1845401634
Buy this book from Amazon.co.uk.
Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom
and Play in an Age of Fear
Routledge January 2009
by Helene Guldberg
‘Helene Guldberg offers a fresh and invigorating challenge to the gloomy conservatism that informs so much contemporary discussion of childhood.‘
Professor David Buckingham, Institute of Education, University of London
‘This is a powerful and passionate book that explains why so much of what we say about children is so wrong.‘
Professor Frank Furedi, author of Paranoid Parenting
‘Guldberg has the ability to look at the whole weird world of what we now call parenting, and figure out how this natural stage of life got to be so strange, so stilted and so difficult. Luckily her writing is anything but! A clear and illuminating look at our parental foibles and their effect on our kids.‘
Lenore Skenazy, founder, Free Range Kids
‘A lovely blend of developmental theory and up-to-date research, a deep knowledge of children, and good old common sense. This bracing book is a gift to children everywhere.‘
David Anderegg PhD, author of Worried All the Time and Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them
‘Should be read by every student teacher, teacher trainer and teacher. It will be a ‘must’ for every parent. It is of more value than any parenting course! Politician and the press who are paranoid about parenting should be made to read it.‘
Dr Dennis Hayes, Canterbury Christ Church University
A book that exposes the stark consequences on child development of both our low expectations of fellow human beings and our safety-obsessed culture.
Children are cooped up, passive, apathetic and corrupted by commerce’ or so we are told. Reclaiming Childhood confronts the dangerous myths spun about modern childhood. Yes, children today are losing out on many experiences past generations took for granted, but their lives have improved in so many other ways. This book exposes the stark consequences on child development of both our low expectations of fellow human beings and our safety-obsessed culture. Rather than pointing the finger at soft ‘junk’ targets and labelling children as fragile and easily damaged, Helene Guldberg argues that we need to identify what the real problems are - and how much they matter.
We need to allow children to grow and flourish, to balance sensible guidance with youthful independence. That means letting children play, experiment and mess around without adults hovering over them. It means giving children the opportunity to develop the resilience that characterises a sane and successful adulthood. Guldberg suggests ways we can work to improve children’s experiences, as well as those of parents, teachers and ‘strangers’ simply by taking a
step back from panic and doom-mongering.
Table of contents
Part 1: The Good, The Bad, and The History: A Balance-Sheet of Modern Childhood
1. A childish panic about the next generation
2. Cocooning children
3. Childhood in historical perspective
Part 2: Freedom and Child Development
4. Growing up: why risk-taking is good for kids
5. Play: what is it good for?
6. The bullying bandwagon
7. Virtual lives? Media, brands and the MySpace generation
Part 3: Taking Real Responsibility: The Role of Adult Society
8. Let parents be parents: the myth of infant determinism
9. Let teachers be teachers: not social workers and ‘happiness counsellors’
10. Let strangers be friends: how the ‘stranger danger’ panic is creating a hostile adult world
January 2009: Pb: 978-0-415-47723-9: £16.99
Buy this book from Amazon.co.uk
About Helene
Dr Helene Guldberg is co-founder and director of spiked, the first custom-built online current affairs publication in the UK.
After working as a primary school teacher, Guldberg obtained a PhD in developmental psychology from the university of Manchester. She currently teaches undergraduate and post-graduate courses in developmental psychology with the Open University and the US study abroad centre, CAPA.
Helene is author of Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear, published by Routledge in January 2009.
‘This is a powerful and passionate book that explains why so much of what we say about children is so wrong.‘
Professor Frank Furedi, author of Paranoid Parenting
Read more about Reclaiming Childhood
Her second book, ‘Just Another Ape?‘, will be published by Imprint Academic on 1 September 2010.
‘An essential antidote to our narcissistic over-identification with our fellow apes.‘
Jeremy Taylor, author of Not a Chimp