Growing Up Lonely: Disconnection and Misconnection in the Lives of our Children

Why the ever-increasing chronic loneliness of modern society is now engulfing our children. Growing Up Lonely is derived from papers presented at the 2018 symposium, “Loneliness and the Power of Permanency,” attended by more than four hundred professional social workers and sponsored by The Home for Little Wanderers, the United States’ first child social welfare agency, founded in 1799. With insights aimed at both professional clinicians and the general public, the book features papers by Harvard Medical School psychiatry professors Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz (coauthors of The Lonely Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century ) and psychiatrist Amy Banks (author of Wired to The Surprising Link between Brain Science and Strong, Healthy Relationships ). In addition, the book reproduces the story that sparked the idea of the symposium, “The Loneliest Boy,” which first appeared in J. W. Freiberg’s book Four Seasons of Loneliness , as well as a new work by Freiberg, who has been called “the Oliver Sacks of law.” Freiberg again uses a story format to depict law cases that illustrate the nature of the misconnections between today’s children and their parents that cause so many to begin life with a lonely trek through a dark and stressful childhood.