Essay: 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...

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