She sounds like a mostly intelligent grownup who chooses to blame her promiscuity on her upbringing, when in fact kids with uptight backgrounds often do the same. She had every choice, she just made ones that were poor for her. Grow up! Take responsibility! Your life as an adult is not your parents' fault!
-- Cynthia Wales, another child of hippies
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This is something we don't hear enough about. I too was raised by a hippie parent. In my case, my mother's desire to divorce my father and "find herself" resulted not only in a total lack of discipline and boundaries, it also resulted in her murder when I was 10 years old, the result of a drug deal gone bad.
What I find especially disturbing is that, while many trappings of hippiedom have largely gone away, I still sense amongst many boomers a strong self-absorption and sense of entitlement, which seems to yield similar familial problems. Preoccupation with "feelin' good and doin' it" has morphed into preoccupation with careers and material things. While it may no longer be okay to run naked through the woods, it's okay for Britney and Dylan to go to all-weekend raves and take ecstasy 'cos Mom and Dad just have too much else going on to supervise.
-- Gabriel Golden
After reading the very entertaining essay on growing up without limits, I am feeling very conflicting sets of emotions. On the one hand, I can accept that parenting involves setting limits and teaching children what is right and wrong.
My experience is very different from Sarah Beach's. I grew up in a family where sex was such a forbidden subject that I waited in fear to lose my virginity at an age well past 30. In addition, I have recently witnessed a close family in which all aspects of day to day life were rigidly controlled in a loving, conservative Christian way. The eldest boy recently killed himself without warning. I blame the control -- too many boundaries left him feeling trapped, with no way out except death.
There is a middle ground. It may be that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, but Sarah Beach's story doesn't sound all that bad. Uncritical acceptance of the hippie era is bad, but from my angle, it looks like people were trying something new in the 60's, unlike today, when making a killing in the stock market/interet seems to motivate far more people.
-- Alan Sailer
While I'm sure many of us lefties will get a chuckle out of this story, I can't help feeling that this story and the others like it will just serve as fodder for the likes of Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, ad nauseum who will hold it up as an example of what happens when the ideas of those evil liberals are put to the test. Sigh.
-- John Baxter
I'm getting a little tired of the entire hippie bashing thing that's going on now. It's almost as tiring as the damned "greatest generation" rant. No one has a perfect childhood and I can definitely see that the author worked under some interesting handicaps. BUT if she'd been raised with a hundred rules (as she claims to have desired) -- none of which seemed reasonable at the time and all of which were not under her control -- she'd be complaining about that and stating how repressive her childhood was!
I'm glad her life is going the way she wants now, but it seems like everyone reacts to their childhoods by either bemoaning, exaggerating and blaming their parents, or by becoming their grandparents!
Let's quit the whining and take responsibility for our own lives. The past is past -- just get on with it!
-- B. Lynch Black
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