New in paperback: Parenting then and now, reviewed by Nora Krug

No one wants to be accused of overparenting. It's much cooler, after all, to let your kids run free range or simply flaunt your bad-mother credentials. Richard Weissbourd, a child and family psychologist who teaches at Harvard, jumps on the bandwagon in The Parents We Mean to Be (Mariner, $14.95). The book offers a nuanced, comprehensive analysis of the role of parents as moral mentors -- and how an unhealthy closeness between parents and children can undermine it. Drawing on extensive field research, Weissbourd makes the case that parents who are too close to their children may be jeopardizing their children's moral growth. Doting parents who "get in the habit of doing small things to make [their] children's lives easier," such as cleaning up after them, getting deeply involved in their schoolwork and placing children's "trivial preferences" before their own, he explains, risk making their children "more fragile, entitled, and self-occupied."

Though there's a fair amount of therapy-speak here, Weissbourd also offers compelling evidence and vivid examples. He writes of a mother, for instance, who, in an effort to shield her 5-year-old daughter from distress, changed her own clothes multiple times until she got her daughter's approval. Putting such a high value on children's happiness, Weissbourd observes, tends to "make children not only less moral but, ironically, less happy." Weissbourd is not suggesting that we "return to a time when it didn't occur to parents to be close to their children," but that we examine which kinds of closeness are in fact driving parents and children further apart.

If you think the backlash against overparenting is something new, Robert Paul Smith's Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing. (Norton, $13.95) will set you straight. Originally published in 1957, this impressionistic memoir makes its argument subtly. Smith, who grew up in suburban New York in the 1920s, recalls the good old days of his childhood, when kids enjoyed pastimes like mumbletypeg (a game involving competitive jackknife throwing), immies (that's marbles) and making their own kites. But most important, kids did a lot of nothing -- and no one bothered them for doing so. "Many many hours of my childhood were spent in learning how to whistle. In learning how to snap my fingers. In hanging from the branch of a tree. In looking at an ants' nest," he writes. "These days, you see a kid lying on his back and looking blank and you begin to wonder what's wrong with him," Smith complains. Just imagine if he'd been writing in the era of Wii and Xbox.

Smith's message may sound crotchety, but he delivers it with charm. He evokes a time when kids were left to their own devices and made aware -- sometimes painfully -- when they had gone too far. Some of this may be sugar-coated nostalgia, but it's hard to quibble with his no-nonsense approach to child-rearing: "Let them moon, let them babble, let them be scared," he suggests. "I guess what I am saying is that people who don't have nightmares don't have dreams."

From our previous reviews:

-- Gaynor Arnold's novel Girl in a Blue Dress (Three Rivers, $15) imagines the "tortured private life" of Charles Dickens in a "moving story" that examines "the intermingling of love and resentment, affection and pettiness, that renders any marriage mysterious to outsiders," according to Ron Charles.

-- Homer & Langley (Random House, $15), by E.L. Doctorow, based on the true story of the Collyer brothers, an eccentric pair of New York pack rats, is "a modern epic tale" whose "solitary protagonists" are "symbols of both American materialism and of American loneliness," wrote Michael Dirda.

-- Jennifer Scanlon's "cracking" biography of Helen Gurley Brown, Bad Girls Go Everywhere (Penguin, $16), "makes a solid case that, apart from her easy-to-satirize excesses, Brown is a genuinely important figure who pioneered a feminism that championed women as cheerful, self-empowered individualists," according to Naomi Wolf.

-- Karen Greenberg "burrows beneath layers of toxic history to excavate a brief and largely forgotten period when the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was not yet notorious," in The Least Worst Place (Oxford, $17.95). Peter Finn called the book "important and compelling."

-- In "What the Heck Are You Up to, Mr. President?" (Bloomsbury, $16) historian Kevin Mattson offers a "radically different reading" of Jimmy Carter's infamous 1979 "malaise" speech. Mattson argues that, "far from a political miscalculation," the speech "was a brave attempt by a thoughtful president to re-imagine the nation and bind citizens and government in a common purpose, one that the author believes should still resonate today," wrote Carlos Lozada.

-- Tim Page, a former classical music reviewer for The Washington Post, was 45 before he knew he had Asperger's syndrome. Page recalls the difficulties he faced before and after the diagnosis in Parallel Play (Vintage, $15), a memoir Suki Casanave praised as "nimble and lyrical."

Krug reviews paperbacks monthly for The Post.