On its 40th anniversary, it is instructive to read Midge Decter’s utterly immediate and yet classic Liberal Parents, Radical Children (1975). The immediacy comes from her observations about what was then a new way of childrearing, the effects of which have lasted and are prevalent today. At the same time, some of her analysis, especially having to do with the academy, serves as more of a starting point for recognizing how much things have changed for the worse.
Decter set out to define, analyze, and indict the generation of parents that raised the baby boomers. She admits that she is focused on a minority of parents, but she is also clearly representing what was a turning point in American life. As Decter explained at the time to People magazine, she was part of the liberal elite she describes in the book—although she credits her husband with preventing her from parenting like them. She was spurred to write when she read that the suicide rate among children had exploded 250 percent between 1960 and 1972. And she was moved when, after 28 bodies were discovered murdered by a Texas serial killer, she “learned that thousands of parents from around the country called the Houston police to learn if their runaways were among the corpses being dug up. . . . All these kids belonged to somebody.”
Decter describes her book as “fictionalized sociology,” in which she presents portraits of various types of twenty- and thirtysomethings, typified by “certain of the patterns of conduct by which you have distinguished yourselves as a generation: dropping out of school, using drugs, sleeping around, creating and defecting from a communal way of life.” More than just defining the children, Decter draws a portrait of the parents who raised those thousands of potheads, sexual revolutionists, communards, and dropouts and the terrible choices they made.
First, the parents decided to throw away traditional parental roles: “There can have been no more arrant disrespecters of the past . . . than we members of the enlightened liberal community,” she writes. Instead of preparing the kids for the real world, for adult responsibility, her generation of liberal parents decided to go to any lengths to protect their offspring from ordinary challenges and competition.
The result, Decter argues, was that “from the time of your earliest childhood you have stood in a relation to the world that can only be characterized as a refusal to be tested.” These young people, known for idealistically seeking to better the world, were unprepared to become adults, to accept responsibility, because they had all been raised as the center of a pain-free universe.
Thirty-nine years later, describing nearly the same segment of parents—“the enlightened liberal community” among the middle classes—Jennifer Senior reported in All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting (2014) that today’s parents are repeating many of the same mistakes, and it is only serving to make them anxious and miserable. Like Decter’s earlier generation, today’s parents are raising children with less religion, less tradition, and none of what Senior calls “folkways.” At the same time, we’ve moved from “trivial freedoms” to almost no freedom at all. The result is kids who, again, cannot handle the real world, who lack basic coping skills, such as self-reliance and what multiple books on the trouble with our education system call “grit.” “We’ve played a role,” Senior writes, “in diminishing [our children’s] capacity for resourcefulness.”
If Midge Decter’s analysis of parents and their children, all little snowflakes and similarly fragile, sounds familiar 40 years on, her description of college sounds nearly the reverse of today’s atmosphere on campus. She explains how many baby boomers just couldn’t handle college because they never before had to face life unprotected. Her portrait of “the dropout” includes this stark image:
Since that time, there’s been a long march by these onetime children through nearly all of the nation’s public institutions—public school, social services, government, and especially the academy—to remold the country in their image. Many of the former radicals who would “organize to smash the state” now run the ivory tower, and instead of demanding that students operate within a given set of rules, the rules have been altered to coddle and comfort them.
Forty years later, the joke is on the parents, some of whom have so ill-prepared their offspring for adulthood that they choose, instead, to keep the fantasy going by moving to college with their kids. Instead of being a place to achieve some separation from parents and a little independence, universities make every effort not to offend: Certain speech is banned to protect delicate sensibilities; too many incoming freshman require some form of remedial instruction. One liberal arts professor recently explained to me that it is now the faculty’s responsibility to concern themselves with the emotional and psychological well-being of their students and to report any concerns to the administration.
The fact that so many institutions of higher learning are nearly devoid of ideological diversity, as typified by campus speech codes that silence dissent, is no accident. It is the very model of today’s liberalism to pay lip service to open-mindedness and independent inquiry—only so long as the outcomes are within the defined boundaries of acceptable opinion.
In Liberal Parents, Radical Children, Decter covers a host of compelling subjects—sex, drugs, Freudian psychology—and does so with unfailingly engaging, clear, and beautiful prose. It was a remarkable achievement then, as it is now—and it helps us understand how we, as parents and children, ended up where we are.
Abby W. Schachter writes about pop culture for Acculturated.com.
