This is a wildly romantic book, both in its literary references and its attitudes toward childhood, but it provides another important corrective to the overly controlled, enclosed and consumerized pattern of child-rearing that has emerged in modern Western cultures, particularly those of Northern Europe and America.

The title of the book "Kith" invokes the phrase "kith and kin" -- kin, of course being one's extended family, and kith, being one's surroundings -- perhaps the square mile around one's home in which children intimately immerse themselves with nature, friends and the larger society.

First my reservations about the book. It is, as I stated above, wildly Romantic -- both in the large "R" movement sense and her small "r" sensibility. Don't get me wrong, I have a rather a rather romantic sensibility myself, but in her near total rejection of the contemporary world, Griffiths seems to be on a rather quixotic quest. The question at the heart of her book is why are Euro-American children so much unhappier than children in traditional societies? Rather than confronting the complexity of contemporary society, she idealizes traditional child-rearing in certain Native American, African, Aboriginal and other tribal societies. Obviously, travelling those pathways is not going to lead to workable child-rearing practices in everyday situations. Also, although she seems to be highly involved with her nieces, nephews and godchildren, she has no children of her own, so lacks the day-to-day challenges of raising children. She has spent her adult life travelling the world and its wildernesses -- her previous book was Wild: An Elemental Journey.

Reservations, aside, I loved this book and raced through it. Griffiths explores and examines the deep importance of nature, animals, the world of the imagination, the desire to roam unfettered, the need for a "tribe," and the connection to the world of, for want of a better word, "faery" to the process of children maturing into self-reliant and self-confident adults. I'm sure many of us remember long, lazy days of summer when we were shooed outside to play in the morning and didn't have to return except for mealtimes (if we didn't pack a lunch to take with us). Adults were not supervising our play or overseeing our every move. We explored parks or woods, rode our bicycles through towns, created our own packs of friends, and lived in the world of childhood. Much of that seems unattainable today. I even cringe sometimes at the freedom I allowed my 8-14 year old children in the 1970s and 1980s to roam the neighborhood and for which I was the object of disapproval from some of their friends' (especially the girls') parents. We have become so attuned to "stranger-danger" that our children turn far too often to consumer products for entertainment rather than to their own landscapes.

In addition to the previously mentioned somewhat anthropological authorities that Griffiths invokes, she ranges widely through the literature of the Romantics, childhood classics such as The Secret Garden, Swallows and Amazons and Huckleberry Finn, progressive educational systems such as those set up by Tolstoy, Rabindinrath Tagore, and the villages of Reggio Emilia to find inspiration for alternative childhood experiences. She totally rejects the authoritarianism of regimented education which she condemns as a product of punishment-oriented Puritanism and a voracious need for capitalist labor. One of my favorite of her quotes is from Einstein, who when asked by a mother how to encourage her child to become a scientist, said, "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."

This is a rich and provocative book. I'd recommend it to anyone who has children, grandchildren, any children in their lives or is interested in children's education. ( )

The prose is ecstatic and the underlying idea (there is really only one) is a welcome corrective to the currently preponderant middle class approach to child rearing. But this is in the end a lazily romantic, non-empirical argument by an author in love with her own words. And sometimes her thesis veers into the ridiculous, revealing that, since she has no children of her own, she lacks the direct, daily, relentless experience of them that would be necessary for her to write about them with real authority. ( )