Essay: ON BEING AN AMERICAN PARENT

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Indeed, enterprising families can still find ample superordinate goals. The possibilities range from tutoring slum kids to organizing block councils, restoring old houses, sailing a sloop to Ireland and running Pop for political office. Steve Hutchison, an Oregon artist, rancher and father of two young sons, offers more ideas: "Build a summer cabin, save the hoot owl, collect thunder eggs, build a telescope, pioneer in Alaska, which desperately needs able people." If the family still lacks a common crisis, says Hutchison, "Hire a wolf to howl at the door."

Many 80-hour-a-week executives might try something else: rejoining their families. In recasting themselves as fathers, they might recast their values and change their lives. Making a living is important, but selling more soap should not destroy the process of raising sons. And why not attack age segregation by putting teen-agers to work teaching tots and nursing old people? In Asia, age is respected instead of rejected. The present U.S. system deprives all age groups of "essential human experience," says Cornell Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, a father of the Head Start program, which deliberately engages parents and older siblings in teaching small children. As he sees it, middle-class families need age-desegregating Head Start projects as much as do the nation's poor.

Such ideas for better child rearing in America are perfectly attainable on a personal if not yet an official basis. In a country that offers more different life styles than any other, there is no reason for viewing the generation gap as insurmountable; no reason why parents and children cannot learn how to fight for rather than against one another. The fact that America is full of disciple families—despite seemingly enormous odds against them—is a counterweight to the relatively few pathological cases that get all the publicity. If the Beatle girl leaves home after living alone for so many years, her parents stand condemned for a failure that Americans can and must avoid.