Culture, I found, is kept alive through constant effort. We blow life into the practices we find meaningful, and in turn, they sustain us. In my travels, I found that the globalisation of culture had not killed off the local. Rather than a bland sea of Western cultural domination, I found people adapting, repurposing, mimicking, resisting and producing their own culture drawn from local influences and from the world - Western, yes, but also Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Middle Eastern, from their neighbours or from further afield.

Each of the hundreds of people I met were hybrid creatures, inflected by born culture and imported culture, religion of birth or acquired, and everyone was hard at work, creating new cultures from what was available to them. The nineteenth century mythology of the nation-state was premised on unity - on what we had in common with strangers in our geographical area. But the globalisation of culture has turned the idea of the unified nation-state on its head. Now, we are all beginning to blur. [pp.5-6]

...[A]round the world, gender fluidity has historically been common. The hijra in India and Pakistan, the bakla in the Philippines, kathoey (ladyboys) in Thailand, and the fa'afafine in Samoa and its equivalents across Polynesia are all cultures of the third sex, the people who walk two worlds, male and female. Born male, these people gravitate towards the effeminate - the adoption of an androgyne or feminine look. More than a hundred American Indian tribes had members of 'two spirits': women and men who identified with the other biological gender and were accepted as transsexuals. In the Koran, there are records of the mukhannathun, effeminate men who worked in music or entertainment, and the term survives today as khanith, a derogatory term. In Indonesia, there are the waria, in Mexico the muxe, and Latin America has its travesti. [p.113]

When cults or subcultures leave society to form a new one, there is a brief sense of walking on air, that giddy, untethered feeling. The balloon lifts up. It's freedom. But it cannot last. Inevitably, new rules are made. Not the old rules, mind, but rules made particularly for the new grouping. Given long enough, a subculture will generate its own police force, its own leadership. And Awing [the self-proclaimed King of Punk] became both policeman and king. [p.241]

[M]ost instances of the third gender tend to be biological men drawn to appear feminine, with fewer cultural niches for lesbians. Like the bakla in the Philippines, people of the third gender have often forged a place for themselves - but that can be made a little easier if you are biologically male and living in a man's world. For the others - lesbians, the transgendered and intersex - life is harder, their sexuality often driven underground. [p.113]

Parents feel the changes in the world; kids don't. Parents often react defensively, and children do not understand what all the fuss is about. Negative parental reactions often originate in hostility toward change. Most adults tend to see their own formative years as normal and what comes afterward as a decline. The only constant is change, and parents and their children experience this in fundamentally different ways.

In the parent-child dynamic, one question is often: Which of us is going to change? Another is: Are we going to move forward or backward? [...] Adults have a guiding role to play in managing the impact of social change as children negotiate their way through the world. The dragons that lurk in the periphery are real. One of the most powerful examples today is corporate capitalism, its marketing to children, and the creation of a shallow popular culture that stands ready to claim our children as unconscious full-time citizens.

This leaves parents facing their own worries, another constant in parental history. Will my child be happy? Will he be successful? Am I doing the right thing? Am I screwing my kid up? Am I being too lenient? Am I being too strict? What is normal? This book attempts to help parents answer those questions, as well as others, such as: What should we hold on to and what should we let go of? What are the new rules? Do any of the old ones still apply? In a world of moral relativism, these questions are more important than ever before. [pp.13-14]

In the end, it all comes down to awareness, moderation, and balance. Parents have to be role models, mediators, and sometimes police officers. What is our relationship with media? Are we heavy or uncritical users? How can we be responsible gatekeepers, mediating between children and the "outside world"? Do we have the fortitude to simply say "no" when all the forces of peer pressure are brought to bear against us? We don't want our kids to grow up in a bubble, unprepared to make the kind of judgements that will be required of them when we are not around. Nor do we want them to lose their souls to a corporate machine bigger and better funded than any institution in history. People question intrusive government and authoritarian institutional religions, but all too often, we not only accept but even seek out and welcome corporate influence. Corporate capitalist consumerism is a "Big Brother" many have learned to love. [pp.207-8]

I'm hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. In hundreds of books and articles this problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued, and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter-parenting, and my personal favorite, the kindergarchy. One writer defines the problem as "simply paying more attention to the upbringing of children than can possibly be good for them." [...] Nobody seems to like the relentless, unhappy pace of American parenting, least of all parents themselves. [p.4]

... without limits, kids will be consumed by their own desires. [...] French parents stress the cadre because they know that without boundaries, children will be overpowered by these desires. The cadre helps to contain all this inner turmoil and calm it down.
That could explain why my children are practically the only ones having tantrums in the park in Paris. A tantrum happens when a child is overwhelmed by his own desires and doesn't know how to stop himself. The other kids are used to hearing non, and having to accept it. It doesn't stop the chain of wanting. [p.237]