Reclaiming our Stolen Youth - New YouTube Video!
Parenting advice for the times w/Karol Markowicz & Bethany Mandel
So much love to our friends Bethany and Karol for kicking off our inaugural book club meeting with Stolen Youth, a must-read for every parent in America.
The authors also offered some simple immediately actionable steps parents can take right away.
Karol shared a useful guide to inappropriate content often be found in school libraries.
We would encourage you to print the list and visit your children’s school (or search the school’s online library catalogue) to check out the books.
One creative, effective and *relatively* non-confrontational way to bring attention to questionable materials is to speak during public expression of local school districts board meeting.
Read the questionable section of the book aloud to the Board of Education.
Follow up with an email to every member of the school board with your full comments and the written excerpt of the book you read. You may also consider sending a photo of the page(s) of the questionable book.
Parents in the Indian River County School District in Florida were successful in removing inappropriate books from their schools just last month after reading such passages to the board.
Bethany discussed how she has moved away from recommending Common Sense Media for book recommendations.
In addition to the organization moving more left, it appears Common Sense is removing parental reviews that do not support the narrative, and in doing so, deprives parents of open source knowledge they need in order to make decisions on what their child reads or watches. You can find more information on age appropriate books with high literary value on Bethany’s
.Another suggestion was that a fair guiding rule could be to seek out children’s books that were written prior to 2000. However, this could pose a problem in Mississauga, Ontario, where a school board removed all books that were written prior to 2008. The Hunger Games and Harry Potter have disappeared from the shelves. So there can be severe unintended consequences and we must tread lightly.
Don’t forget to join us Thursday for our X spaces on high school debate:
OUR NEXT BOOK CLUB meeting will feature microbiologist
’s book FEAR OF A MICROBIAL PLANET, published by our friends at on Thursday October 26 8PM - 9:30PM EST. This time we promise to make the evening more interactive with audience participation. This is the book you need to read to arm yourself with the info you need to fight back against germophobia and safetyism.Registration link coming shortly!
