Liberal Parents, Radical Children

...And here again it is "real," in that these children perceive, quite accurately, that they can count upon a benign, protective social system and—above all—upon infinitely forgiving parents to spare them the worst...

...skyrocketing increases—a doubling, quadrupling, sextupling—in psychiatric hospitalizations of the young...

...Book Review/Joseph Adelson The Brood of Permissiveness • • An old friend of mine said of this splendid book, ironically, that it should have been written twenty-five years earlier, before she began raising her family...

...There is now good evidence that overindulgent, tacitly neglectful, "permissive" parents are as much (or more) a menace to the child's sound development as is the overly restrictive, "authoritarian" family...

...We were a generation of parents possessed by an insouciant self-confidence--it was later to seem hubris—about our ability to rear children not merely well, but perfectly...

...or one saw its apparent opposite, an alarming absence of constraint, a readiness to plunge headlong into drugs, delinquency, promiscuous sex, kinky sex, and all other :onceivable forms of recklessness...

...In a more sober era, these events might have evoked a literature of lamentation and anxiety...

...As to tendentiousness, the author could easily have made a better case for her thesis simply by choosing more melodramatic examples—let us say a suicide, a psychotic, a derelict, a fire-bomber...

...Note that this complex of attitudes was later to generate the social reform movements of the late 1960s...

...This intellectual sludge now has its solvent in Liberal Parents, Radical Children...

...Psychotherapeutic work can sometimes serve as a distant early warning signal, and the alert clinician could sense that something new and troubling was abroad in American life...

...their tendencies to define themselves solely vis-a-vis their parents...

...We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling...

...and authoritative, where discipline is guided by firmly held values and a good deal of warmth between parents and child...

...Among the youngsters of the educated class, one began to discern a certain diffuseness, a slackening of energy, a loss of purpose and thrust...

...From a psychologist's standpoint, what is extremely interesting about this book is its uncanny congruence with important yet largely unknown findings in clinicaland child research...

...It opens with a chapter of fierce, concentrated energy and breathtaking power—"A Letter to the Young"—addressed not only to the young, but to their parents as well, and indeed to the numberless captives of the liberal ethos...

...That something had gone terribly wrong became evident in the early years of the sixties, when the children of the postwar years first entered adolescence, and began to appear in our clinics...

...As a day in and day out reader and writer of all too "real" case histories, let me speak strongly to the :he Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 25 contrary...

...And like most other enterprises of the Great Society, its vainglory destined it for certain failure...

...New reputations were made, flagging ones sustained, all by the propagation of lies and illusions...

...Nothing genuinely traumatic overcomes these youngsters...

...Ultimately one did not have to rely only on rumor, impression, and inference, as the grim data began to come in: an astonishing jump of 250% in the suicide rate among adolescents...

...one might say that our generation's first collective venture in social engineering was undertaken in the home...

...There have been some critical complaints about these case studies, being "fictionalized," are therefore not "real"—a view I find absurdly literalistic...

...That bravura opening chapter then leads us to the major business of the book —the exposition of representative life histories...

...We could redeem all the errors of the past, the very errors practiced upon us, given purity of intention, correct technique, and an intense belief in human perfectibility...

...It has taken some time for this to become plain, partly because of conceptual confusions (ideologically inspired, I would say) which did not adequately distinguish between "authoritarian" and "authoritative" family climates and which, similarly, confounded "democratic" and "permissive" child-rearing styles...

...it is too real, too close for comfort...

...The young were to be the source of our salvation...

...But she has had the tact and restraint to avoid easy targets...

...This chapter states themes which the rest of the book will illuminate: the difficulty the children of the New Class have in withstandingfrustration...

...I found these studies compellingly "real"—that is, lifelike—in that they evoke, hauntingly, many actual lives I have known...

...In particular, interactions between parents and children are caught beautifully...

...indeed it struck me that these narratives are far more "real" than most clinical case studies, for the subject is seen not merely from his own perspective but at sufficient distance to lend balance and verisimilitude...

...Midge Decter has now emerged as the most perceptive critic of this class, of its deceits, fictions, and vanities...

...their immense self-regard...

...We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with you that would have fed your true strengths...

...above all, the failure of those parents to offer moral authority confidently...

...She brings to her work great courage and a sharp eye for the follies of our time...

...26 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975...

...yet perhaps not so foolish after all, for as Miss Decter points out, these pandering sentiments were a way for ambitious men and women to achieve power and worldly success...

...Soon :here were disturbing portents not merely n the consulting room but much closer to some, as one was asked to be counselor tnd consoler of friends, neighbors, and :olleagues about their errant teenagedchildren...

...To some degree they did, but they also released a more widely dispersed literature of antic celebration...

...One might adduce dozens of other findings to this effect, together with the mounting evidence from clinical work with the affluent young, pointing to the damaging influence of a parental permissiveness which, all too often, conceals that deadly self-absorption which marks so many upper-middle-class lives...

...Observing parent-child interchanges in homes, she could differentiate three general patterns: authoritarian, where parental power is exercised harshly and arbitrarily...

...Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safekeeping you had been given...

...Her irony is, in part, a way of recognizing that a quarter of a century ago we would not have understood ourselves ever to be in such need...

...A clarification of these confusions has been accomplished in a series of excellent studies and theoretical papers by Diana Baumrind at Berkeley...

...Within American society," Baumrind writes, "families who maintain a strong belief system and a traditional family structure seem best able to shield their youth from drug use and anomie," and she goes on to paraphrase another study, by Jeanne Block, which "suggests that parents of alienated students are over-involved with their children...

...It is that, I think, which gives her work its power...

...There are four such studies, entitled "The Dropout," "The Pothead," "The Sexual Revolutionist," and "The Communard...

...The authoritative milieu is most likely to produce children who are self-reliant morally...

...permissive, marked by fitfulness, ambivalence, and inconsistency...

...and there has been the further suggestion that Miss Decter was tendentiously arranged her narratives so as to suit her thesis...

...It is all whimper and no bang...

...but what makes her writing unique is its (often) unspoken understanding of how general ideas become concrete, in deeds and postures and attitudes, and so transform our lives...

...Where was Midge Decter when I needed her...

...We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence...

...These portraits capture brilliantly the erratic, seemingly accidental divagations of young lives proceeding toward outcomes we later understand to have been deeply determined...

...They were to show us the way to world peace, inner harmony, advanced consciousness, a political millennium, what have you...

...It is hard to imagine a Liberal Parents, Radical Children by Midge Decter Coward, McCann and Geoghegan $7.95 body of writing more egregious, more foolishly mistaken...

...In this respect, she is very much like George Orwell—an intellectual very much at home in the palpable...

...Here the author proves herself to be the master of the genre which—unless I am mistaken —she herself invented several years ago in her exquisite essay "The Liberated Woman...