Curse of the hippie parents

Benign neglect and noodle dancing to Ravi Shankar do not a healthy childhood make.

By Sarah Beach

Aug. 22, 2001 | One summer when I was 10 or 11, a boy I'll call Jackson befriended my brother and came over to our house frequently to play in our pond. After a few hours of splashing around, naked as usual, we went up to the house to dry off and have something to eat. Jackson plopped down on my mom's platform rocker, grabbed his penis and started to masturbate.

"Hey!" I yelled, and threw a pillow at him. "Don't do that right in front of everybody!"

"My mom says, 'If it feels good, do it,'" he said, whacking away.

If it feels good, do it: a rallying cry of the '60s and the root of a lot of really awful parenting. Jackson may have been admirably comfortable with his body, but like many children of hippie parents, he was in the dark about some very basic social rules, such as the one that says don't jack off in public.

Growing up with no boundaries will do that to you. In their effort to raise children without inhibitions, my parents and their peers eschewed the teachings of Benjamin Spock and went for a more anarchic, Fellini-esque parenting approach. Sometimes this meant noodle dancing to Ravi Shankar into the wee hours of a school night, or spending whole days swimming naked and gorging on blackberries. But there was a dark side to this intoxicating rejection of rules and boundaries. With everyone embracing spontaneity and the mandates of the id, there was no one left to assume the adult role. People like my parents may have had the best of intentions, but in a wide-eyed quest for social change, they became children. And their actual children suffered as a result.

Sure, the benign neglect of hippie parenting had some side benefits. If you wanted to stay home from school, you could -- as long as you had a really good excuse, such as, "I just can't get behind school today, Mom." Hippie kids also got to run around in the woods a lot, without being overly burdened by Establishment concepts like sunscreen or mosquito repellent. My mom took me on long walks, taught me to find wild huckleberries and to weave baskets out of sticks. She woke us up at midnight for impromptu waffle feasts. If we found something cool, like a dead dragonfly or a weird mushroom, she would be just as curious and amazed as we were. She was convinced magic existed, and since she was our mom, we absolutely believed it. That was wonderful.

However, the hippie creed of "no rules, no limits" combined with a horror of hypocrisy sent groovy parents skidding down a dangerously slippery child-rearing slope. If you smoke pot, what are you going to do when your kids ask to try it? It would be hypocritical not to let them. And if pot's OK, why not mushrooms or acid? If you tell your kids sexual expression is great, and you yourself frequently "ball" (to use the mot juste) with abandon, how do you explain to your daughter that it's not OK for some crusty old guy at a Grateful Dead show to feel her up in the child-care tipi? The old standby "It's wrong because I said so" was out, because they'd taught us from birth that such a statement is fascistic. So, to avoid the hypocrisy of potentially arbitrary limits, hippie parents placed few or none.

And kids need limits. Someone in the family unit has to take the adult role, preferably the adults themselves. On the commune, I actually begged my mom for rules. "Let's have a rule where kids have to go to bed at a certain time every night!" I said. Or, "Let's have a rule that says children should be seen and not heard!" I think I'd read that in Dickens. It sounded like a great idea to me, not because I had some freakish desire to be silent, but because I knew I could never live up to it and then perhaps I'd be punished. I longed for discipline, for someone to tell me, "That's quite enough of that, young lady!"

Next page: We were embarrassed by all the unfettered humping