Book Review: Child, Please: How Mama’s Old-School Lessons Helped Me Check Myself Before I Wrecked Myself
by Ylonda Gault Caviness
Publication Date: May 01, 2015
List Price: $25.95
Format: Hardcover
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780399169960
Imprint: TarcherPerigee
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
Read a Description of Child, Please: How Mama’s Old-School Lessons Helped Me Check Myself Before I Wrecked Myself
Book Reviewed by Kam Williams
“In this wise and funny memoir, Ylonda Gault Caviness describes her journey to the realization that all the parenting advice she was obsessively devouring, as a new parent, and sharing with the world as a parenting expert… didn’t mean scratch compared with her mama’s old-school wisdom as a strong black woman…
With child #1, Caviness set her course: to give her children everything she had. Child #2 came along, and she patiently persisted. But when her 3rd child arrived, [she] was so exhausted that she decided to listen to what her mother had been saying all along: Give them everything they want, and there’ll be nothing left of you.
In Child, Please, Caviness describes the road back to embracing a more sane—not to mention loving—way of raising children. Her mother had it right all along.”
—Excerpted from the book jacket
Toya Graham was at home watching TV coverage of the recent Baltimore
riots when she spotted her only son, Michael, in an unruly crowd of kids
taunting and throwing objects at the police. Without giving it a second
thought, the shocked, single-mother of six sprang into action and rushed
right down to the scene to retrieve her misbehaving 16 year-old.
Cell
phone cameras caught Toya lecturing and slapping Michael silly as she
dragged him away. The video soon went viral and the debate began about
whether or not the corporal punishment was appropriate. She was dubbed
“Mother of the Year” by some and abusive by others.
The incident
reminded me of a bygone era when not only your own momma but any adult in
the neighborhood might straighten you out if you were messin’ up. However,
that strict style of upbringing has long since fallen by the wayside in
favor of a politically-correct age of permissiveness.
Nevertheless,
perhaps the pendulum might be ready to swing back in the other direction, as
evidenced by Toya Graham’s teachable moment about accountability and by the
publication of Child, Please: How Mama’s Old-School Lessons Helped Me Check
Myself before I Wrecked Myself. Ironically, this delightful memoir was
written by Ylonda Gault Caviness, a sister who, for years, had appeared as
an expert on everything from The Today Show to National Public Radio, where
she would extol the virtues of the relatively-lax, modern parenting styles,
much to the chagrin of her more traditional mother.
Ylonda has
belatedly come to embrace more of her mom’s supposedly-antiquated approach
after becoming exasperated by the challenge of rearing her own three
daughters. “Any fool could see, Mama had the whole motherhood thing down to
a science,” she concedes. “Now, in my forties, I finally get it.”
An
entertaining autobiography and also an overdue salute to generations of
African-American females who’ve held families together while successfully
meeting the challenge of raising kids right.