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."