City Desk: Joined at the Hip

FIRST, make sure both you and your spouse work at home. You must have maximum daytime flexibility, and you must appear together – your success depends on your identity as a team. Second, go regularly to some place where young people work. You have to see them often; meeting them in passing is no good. Restaurants and coffee houses, which require friendly, scantily paid staffs, seem to be ideal. Finally, you must have been born no later than the Johnson/Goldwater election. If the gap in age between you and the young people is less than twenty years, you lack a vital traffic barrier. Now you’re ready to be hip parents.

It’s so much easier than being parents. That involves intercourse, pregnancy, teething, measles, homework, sports, and dating, plus college educations that are the cost of a fleet of new cars, unless they join the Marines or the circus. Hip parents can parachute directly into the age when the young person is socialized, and as attractive as most of us ever get, while being spared all expenses, which the real parents have considerately provided.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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FIRST, make sure both you and your spouse work at home. You must have maximum daytime flexibility, and you must appear together – your success depends on your identity as a team. Second, go regularly to some place where young people work. You have to see them often; meeting them in passing is no good. Restaurants and coffee houses, which require friendly, scantily paid staffs, seem to be ideal. Finally, you must have been born no later than the Johnson/Goldwater election. If the gap in age between you and the young people is less than twenty years, you lack a vital traffic barrier. Now you’re ready to be hip parents.

It’s so much easier than being parents. That involves intercourse, pregnancy, teething, measles, homework, sports, and dating, plus college educations that are the cost of a fleet of new cars, unless they join the Marines or the circus. Hip parents can parachute directly into the age when the young person is socialized, and as attractive as most of us ever get, while being spared all expenses, which the real parents have considerately provided.