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From foolish permissiveness to foolish repressiveness, too many American middle-class parents careen downward from the joys of birth to the final whimper, "What did we do wrong?" The hard answer is that failed parents tend to be failed people who use children for their own emotional hang-ups. They never stop, look or listen to the kids; they never grasp that parenthood is a full-time job, perhaps the most important job in a chronically changing America. They never see the challenge: teaching a child integrity—the self-respect that makes for strong, kind men and women who can cope with life's constant temptations to self-betrayal, and who are willing to face the fact that life is a set of problems to be solved.
Listen
How to be a good parent? All the experts wryly advise that the easiest way is to have good parents. Also blessed are families battling for what Psychologist Muzafer Sherif calls "superordinate goals"—the kind of unifying struggle for existence that once cemented families of pioneers and immigrants. "Hostility gives way," reports Sherif, "when groups pull together to achieve overriding goals which are real and compelling for all concerned." In this sense, some impoverished Americans are luckier than affluent parents, who must use their wits to seek emotional unity.
The key is communication, the widely neglected art of engendering openness between generations. Many parents have no idea what their children really think because they never give them a chance to explain. "Can't you see I'm busy?" is a put-down that ought to be banned from the parental lexicon. "Listen" ought to be tattooed over every parent's heart. Regular "time alone" with parents so that children can unburden themselves is vital. As Educator Clark Kerr advises: "Spend time, not money." There is no better investment in a day when children are often better educated than their parents, or at least schooled in a far different intellectual vocabulary. Unless parents deliberately verse themselves in the new art, books, films, music and mores assailing their kids, they risk being stamped as unspeakable-to-squares.
Basic to communication is the art of helping children (or adults) to express, and thus handle, their inchoate feelings. It seldom pays to condemn or reason with an angry child; strong feelings vanish not by fiat but rather by the clarification that occurs in a child's mind when a parent "mirrors" or states his problems for him. To spank a tot who says, "I hate you," is to store up his anger that will augment future misbehavior. A skillful mother listens, says, "I know just how you feel," and the child's feeling that someone understands shrinks the anger to a size that he himself can subdue. Reassurance rather than reprimand is often the best medicine for defeat or failure.