In her latest book, Ships Without A Shore: America’s Undernurtured Children, Anne R. Pierce takes a hard look at the emerging data on the effects of day care and the hyper-structuring of children’s lives with endless activities. She analyzes our shifting moral-philosophical priorities and exposes the fractured condition of our families. Pierce submits that today’s childrearing trends may just spell the death of childhood—the crucial stage in human development.

Ships Without A Shore:

America’s Undernurtured Children

Childhood in America has changed, and not for the better. From day care for babies, to the exhausting array of activities for children, to the storm of lurid and violent shows now deemed appropriate for the young, to the expectation that teenagers build resumes, childhood has been thoroughly redefined. Anne R. Pierce argues that this radical re-definition has been embraced with remarkably little discussion about what children, by nature, need.

Steeped in intellectual permissiveness, we have convinced ourselves that parental substitutes are as good as parents themselves at caring for children, that the concepts of nurture and of the maternal are archaic and irrelevant, that more lessons and sports are better than less, and that innocence and knowledge are less important than worldly attitudes and competitive skills.

Book Reviews

Ships Without A Shore:

America’s Undernurtured Children

"Thoughtful parents will find Anne Pierce’s Ships Without A Shore a provocative, even disturbing book. Pierce challenges the ethos of self-fulfillment, personal achievement, and moral relativism propagated by conventional wisdom and popular culture, and draws a bleak picture of its effects on child rearing. She draws on her own experience as a parent as well as on neurological, psychological, and other social scientific research, taking a long historical perspective and appealing to the insights of an earlier philosophical and religious tradition. Pierce talks unfashionably and compellingly about children’s natural needs for stable parental love and care and for innocence protected from corruption." —Nathan Tarcov, Committee on Social Thought and Department of Political Science, University of Chicago

"Ships Without A Shore provides a vivid and stinging critique of the state of affairs of our young—from babies to adolescents. Exhibiting exceptional scholarly review, Anne R. Pierce provides a compelling discussion of the key issues that contribute to child development and health in our rapidly changing world, from parenting to peer and media influences. She raises concerns about the way in which modern forces are filling our children’s lives with information and busy activities that have empty materialistic goals and do not engender introspection or enjoyment of simple pleasures. She argues convincingly that without giving children appropriate time to reflect on the wonders of being alive during the right developmental stages, we may be raising an antisocial and non-creative generation of children who will grow to become adults unable to reach their imaginative, altruistic and emotionally balanced potential. This is an extremely important book on the challenges of child development at our current technological crossroads at which media is able to deliver incredible ‘programming’ to our youth to potentially disastrous effect." —James E. Swain MD, PhD, FRCPC, Child Study Center at Yale University

"Gutsy and provocative, Anne Pierce presents an articulate, no-holds-barred indictment of current child-rearing practices. Read this book, and you will have plenty to talk—and to think—about!" —Jane M. Healy, PhD, Educational psychologist and author of "Endangered Minds; Why Our Children Don't Think and What We Can Do About It"