ON BEING AN AMERICAN PARENT

She's leaving home After living alone For so many years. --Beatle song

WOVEN into that poignant ballad of a runaway daughter is her parents' haunting lament: "We gave her everything money could buy." That money can't buy love is one of pop music's hoariest cliches, but the Beatles well know that too many parents have reached that desperate extreme. In a day when the generation gap yawns ever wider, the Beatles get rich by singing that communication has supposedly ceased, that parents and children have become strangers to one another.

War between generations is nothing new. Socrates bitterly attacked youth's "bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for their elders. Children nowadays are tyrants." All through history, denouncing the young has been a tonic for tired blood. More important, defying elders is hygienic for the young. A child's task is self-definition; unless he can distinguish himself from his culture, though on the culture's terms, a boy never quite becomes a man. Growing up is a dialectical process that requires things that one can push against in order to become stronger. It takes limited war against worthy opponents; a child matures by testing himself against limits set by loving adults. Study after study shows that two things are vital to a child's later independence. First, warmly firm parents who admire each other and on whom he can model himself while breaking away. Second, opportunities to prove his competence in work and love. It is often said that all this is dead in America.

Can that be true?

"Everything for the Kids"

To charge that American parents are flunking the job is to ignore the stunning fact that most American youngsters now work harder, think deeper, love more and even look better than any previous generation. Other cultures worship gods or ancestors; Americans revere children, and they must be doing something right in the process. "Everything for the kids" is a U.S. creed that moves G.I.s to feed every war waif in sight; that goads concern for the country's ghetto schools; that has already provided most American children with the best medical care, free education, anti-child-labor laws and unparalleled freedom from adult repression.

And yet something is clearly wrong in Eden. Quite a few strapping youngsters--suffer the little parents--are spectacularly discontented. Even more disturbing, too many youngsters are withdrawing rather than warring. While flower children go to pot, the new disease of alienation drives elite collegians into private exile. "Children are not fighting their parents," says Author-Sociologist Edgar Z. Friedenberg (The Vanishing Adolescent). "They're abandoning them."

At the heart of Eden's anomie lie vast technological changes in Western culture that have steadily lengthened childhood and sharply diminished communication between generations. In primitive cultures, boys become men immediately upon surviving harsh rites of passage. In agrarian societies, a hard-working farmer's son rapidly becomes a certified adult. Until recently, puberty occurred at about 14 or 15, marriage two or three years later. The word "teenager" was inconceivable for such 17-year-old adults as Joan of Arc or Surveyor George Washington. In the 18th century, many upper-class Englishmen impressively taught their eldest sons at home; in stressing adult concerns as well as academics, they took Locke's advice: "The sooner you treat him as a man, the sooner he will be one."

Today, the pressure is to stay in school to be better prepared for life in a complex society. Meanwhile, better nutrition has ironically quickened puberty; the young are now biological adults at twelve or 13, but they usually cannot legally work full time at even the few remaining unskilled jobs until at least 16; though draftable at 18, they cannot vote until 21, and are often economically dependent on their parents until 24 or 25. In effect, they may stay children for more than a decade after becoming "adults."

Divided Living

Nothing is wrong with segregating youth as a distinct stage of life, provided that the right purpose is served, namely to strengthen children for highly complex roles. On the whole, this is just what happens to the vast majority of American youngsters. Even so, the failure rate is big enough to ask why some of the most privileged children are so unready for adult life. One reason is the lack of self-shaping experience; part of the hippie syndrome is a quest for adventure and competence. They did not have the benefit of those cattle-boat jobs that might have helped to slake the thirst for adventure; they rarely got a chance to help their father at work.

To a startling degree, American parents have handed child raising to educational institutions that can not or will not do the job. Not that parents deliberately neglect children; life has simply changed. Families have lost unifying economic functions and have shrunk to two adults with no aunts, uncles or grandparents to help guide the children. All the heat is on parents, but fathers typically work in distant offices, leaving mothers to raise sons with insufficient fatherly support. Too many mothers are preoccupied with their outside activities--everything but the children.

Technology heavily burdens the two-adult--or what anthropologists call the "nuclear"--family. Modern society demands what Yale Psychologist Kenneth Keniston calls "technological ego dictatorship," a talent for divided living that requires coolly rational behavior at work, reserving feeling for home. Wholeness is often elusive. "Home is where the heart is," but more than one-third of U.S. mothers work at least part time, and some fathers hardly see the kids all week. According to Psychiatric Social Worker Virginia Satir, the average family dinner lasts ten to 20 minutes; some families spend as little as ten minutes a week together. Studies show that father absence has baneful effects (especially on boys), ranging from low self-esteem to hunger for immediate gratification and susceptibility to group influence. Hippies commonly flee from father-absent homes in which despairing mothers either overindulge their children or, as surrogate achievers, overpressure them. "The big thing," a college-freshman acidhead explains, "is that my father makes more of his work than it really is, leaving us the crumbs." Recalls a bitter Navy daughter: "I despise my father. He was never there. He was in the Navy 120 years."

With their own uncertainties, U.S. parents lead the world in gobbling child-care books; Spock's sales recently passed 20.5 million. Whatever their merits, the books produce a good many faddishly permissive parents. Often a father is more involved in living up to his child's expectations than the child is in living up to his. To avoid "hurting" children, he shields them from adult power, indulges their impulses, and thus inflicts the injury that a New York headmaster calls "denial of denial." Such children are stunned when they discover that parents don't practice what they preach.

While most parents sigh that "there but for the grace of God go I," the press now daily inflates incidents suggesting that hell hath no fury like a scornful child. In panic, some weak parents suddenly fight dirty, for example, having a child arrested after they find pot in his room. Equally destructive are those so worried about their own status that they hush up serious misconduct and bribe miscreants with new cars. Still others incredibly flee on vacation, leaving their kids to stage monster open-house parties. Then there are swinging parents, who even try LSD with the kids, another form of child abandonment that robs children of adult limits to test themselves against. As one hippie-watching sociologist puts it: "How can you rebel sexually against a mother who will be happy to fit you with a diaphragm at the age of 14?"

From foolish permissiveness to foolish repressiveness, too many American middle-class parents careen downward from the joys of birth to the final whimper, "What did we do wrong?" The hard answer is that failed parents tend to be failed people who use children for their own emotional hang-ups. They never stop, look or listen to the kids; they never grasp that parenthood is a full-time job, perhaps the most important job in a chronically changing America. They never see the challenge: teaching a child integrity--the self-respect that makes for strong, kind men and women who can cope with life's constant temptations to self-betrayal, and who are willing to face the fact that life is a set of problems to be solved.

Listen

How to be a good parent? All the experts wryly advise that the easiest way is to have good parents. Also blessed are families battling for what Psychologist Muzafer Sherif calls "superordinate goals"--the kind of unifying struggle for existence that once cemented families of pioneers and immigrants. "Hostility gives way," reports Sherif, "when groups pull together to achieve overriding goals which are real and compelling for all concerned." In this sense, some impoverished Americans are luckier than affluent parents, who must use their wits to seek emotional unity.

The key is communication, the widely neglected art of engendering openness between generations. Many parents have no idea what their children really think because they never give them a chance to explain. "Can't you see I'm busy?" is a put-down that ought to be banned from the parental lexicon. "Listen" ought to be tattooed over every parent's heart. Regular "time alone" with parents so that children can unburden themselves is vital. As Educator Clark Kerr advises: "Spend time, not money." There is no better investment in a day when children are often better educated than their parents, or at least schooled in a far different intellectual vocabulary. Unless parents deliberately verse themselves in the new art, books, films, music and mores assailing their kids, they risk being stamped as unspeakable-to-squares.

Basic to communication is the art of helping children (or adults) to express, and thus handle, their inchoate feelings. It seldom pays to condemn or reason with an angry child; strong feelings vanish not by fiat but rather by the clarification that occurs in a child's mind when a parent "mirrors" or states his problems for him. To spank a tot who says, "I hate you," is to store up his anger that will augment future misbehavior. A skillful mother listens, says, "I know just how you feel," and the child's feeling that someone understands shrinks the anger to a size that he himself can subdue. Reassurance rather than reprimand is often the best medicine for defeat or failure.

Like the Supreme Court, however, good parents draw a sharp line between free speech and illegal conduct. Author-Psychologist Haim G. Ginott, author of the currently much-discussed Between Parent and Child, argues that "most discipline problems consist of two parts: angry feelings and angry acts. Each part has to be handled differently. Feelings have to be identified and expressed; acts may have to be limited and redirected." How and when to set limits depends partly on the child's age. Nothing makes a small child more anxious than being asked if he "wants" to do this or that and then being given reasons as to why he should. Dr. Spock, sometimes accused of permissiveness, firmly advises, "Just do what's necessary." In short: time for bed, lights out, no chatter.

Limits certainly require reasons, but once clearly stated, they should be enforced without exception. Letting a child get away with something that he knows is wrong or dangerous makes him feel that his parents don't love him--and rightly so. Old-fashioned as it may seem, children still need discipline, guidelines--even the supra-self imperatives of religion. In Seattle, a permissive father's 14-year-old daughter who had been slipping out at night to date a paroled convict was straightened out only after a community-relations officer bluntly told her father that he had to show some stern authority. "The girl was screaming silently, 'Help me; make me stop this,' " said the officer. "What she wanted was security--a dad behind her. She wanted to go to bed with a Teddy bear, not an ex-convict."

The Disciple Family

"Discipline comes from being a disciple," says Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim; both words come from the Latin word for pupil. Children become disciples of parents who enjoy and back up one another; whose mutual respect and ungrudging praise for work well done makes children draw a positive picture of themselves. But the approach must be genuine; the young mind is quick to spot the phony.

In disciple families, "no" is said as lovingly as "yes." The children learn to wait; the parents refuse to buy them this or that until they prov e themselves mature enough to use it wisely. Allowances are given not as a dole, but to train children in budgeting necessary expenses. Little girls are not pushed into premature dating; the parents couldn't care less that "everybody else does it." Girls are not given contraceptives because sex is not put in a bag; the girls first want to become women, and are secure enough not to have to prove themselves by sleeping around.

One way to help build a disciple family is to make sure that parents and children never stop doing meaningful things together. Family games, hikes, building projects and political debates--such activities underline adult skills that children then naturally want to have. Just because evening meals get tense is no reason to quit them; there is no better ritual for spotting and curing the tensions. A San Francisco family has no fear of the kids' trying drugs; everyone does volunteer work together at the narcotics-control center.

Indeed, enterprising families can still find ample superordinate goals. The possibilities range from tutoring slum kids to organizing block councils, restoring old houses, sailing a sloop to Ireland and running Pop for political office. Steve Hutchison, an Oregon artist, rancher and father of two young sons, offers more ideas: "Build a summer cabin, save the hoot owl, collect thunder eggs, build a telescope, pioneer in Alaska, which desperately needs able people." If the family still lacks a common crisis, says Hutchison, "Hire a wolf to howl at the door."

Many 80-hour-a-week executives might try something else: rejoining their families. In recasting themselves as fathers, they might recast their values and change their lives. Making a living is important, but selling more soap should not destroy the process of raising sons. And why not attack age segregation by putting teen-agers to work teaching tots and nursing old people? In Asia, age is respected instead of rejected. The present U.S. system deprives all age groups of "essential human experience," says Cornell Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, a father of the Head Start program, which deliberately engages parents and older siblings in teaching small children. As he sees it, middle-class families need age-desegregating Head Start projects as much as do the nation's poor.

Such ideas for better child rearing in America are perfectly attainable on a personal if not yet an official basis. In a country that offers more different life styles than any other, there is no reason for viewing the generation gap as insurmountable; no reason why parents and children cannot learn how to fight for rather than against one another. The fact that America is full of disciple families--despite seemingly enormous odds against them--is a counterweight to the relatively few pathological cases that get all the publicity. If the Beatle girl leaves home after living alone for so many years, her parents stand condemned for a failure that Americans can and must avoid.

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