There was a time, and most of us grew up in it, when a generally supportive and nurturing home atmosphere was usually enough to make kids good kids and parents good parents. Moms and dads could take a fairly passive, leave-well-enough-alone approach to parenting. When problems did arise, solutions could be found, often from "experts" whose books took the tone of "If Johnny does this, you do this," or "If Susan develops this problem, try this solution." Parenting was largely a reactive process and a defense.

Those days are gone! The world has changed. Kids today hear a thousand voices we never heard and face a thousand challenges we never faced. Children have always been enormously impressionable, sucking into themselves the attitudes, values, and perspectives they are most exposed to. But the difference is that today they are exposed to everything -- literally bombarded by the media, the Internet, and their actual and virtual peer group with all kinds of dangerous impressions and negative values.

This book, as its title and subtitle suggest, advances a whole new and much more proactive approach to parenting. Today's parents need a strategy, an offense rather than a defense -- a plan for teaching values and for creating a home environment that includes the order, the commitment, the consistency, the roots, and the honest communication that the larger world lacks. These elements of family, which used to come rather naturally, now have to be fought for and carefully developed within a home by parents who understand the challenges their kids face and who have plans and purpose in their parenting.

The book has two parts. Part One is to help us understand why parenting is harder today and why we must take a more active approach. Part Two is to teach us how to take the proactive approach and make it work in today's world.

The purpose of Part One is not to present a full-blown sociological analysis of the times or a parent's manifesto on the needs and rights of families. Such would take both more scholarship and more pages than we have here. Rather, in Part One we look at what's wrong with our world from a parent's perspective and make a case for why we must be more involved. Part One is also a place where we parents (both the writers and the readers of this book) can express some of our feelings and frustrations about how difficult it is to raise children today... about how many forces try to pull our children away from the basic values and the state of safety that we want for them.

The mode of our time is reactive. We are exposed to and must respond to more outside stimuli than any other people of any other time. We react to media and to many agents acting upon us, and we react to our children's behavior rather than making conscious efforts to frame and develop it. After we have developed a clearer perspective of this new and reactive world we live in, in Part Two we lay out a proactive strategy whereby parents can reestablish within their homes the eleven essential elements of happy families, each of which takes more effort to achieve today than it did in previous generations.

The bottom line: This is not a book about how to change the world and make it a better place in which to raise children (although the closing section does include a sort of parent's wish list about what government and business could do for families). It is a book about how to change our parenting and our approach to our children and our families so as to counteract outside forces and maximize our own kids' chances to grow up happy.