Doing It Without Jerry

The Children of the Counterculture By John Rothchild and Susan Berns Wolf Doubleday, 207 pp., $7.95 This is a story by and about two people who can’t handle their two little kids. They are bigger and smarter (he a former managing editor of the Yale Daily News; she a Bennington girl), and they have all the money. But the kids have all the power, and use it constantly to rip off the adults. Are we heading for another domestic tragedy? Not quite. These two lucky kids, by the grace of God and a contract from Doubleday, get run through the ex-Spock facto communes from Miami to California and back and presto! no more problems. It’s all here for the kids to read 15 years from now and demand equal time from the publisher.

The authors have this fear, see, you discipline a kid, he hates you forever or longer like Captain Ahab the white whale and vice versa. Commune parents, they discover, have no such fear about tomorrow: “the only important question was whether the little girl was being a bitch right now, or the little boy a brat right now.” It was a marvelously sudden coming-to-wisdom for the authors: no two-semester seminar with term papers on Bettelheim. Just Melanie, the commune parent, taking command of Bernsie, the authors’ having-a-fit city kid. ‘We don’t cop to that behavior,’ [she said] and took Berns back to the car, ushered her inside, and told her, ‘Don’t come out till you shape up.’ Nobody had ever done that to Berns. We were stunned. It was one thing for this woman to comment on Susan’s permissiveness, but now she had taken control of the children and was using our car as a prison. At best, it was a totally impetuous intrusion on our parental rights, and, at worst, it was an emotional kidnapping. But Melanie was so sure of herself that for some reason we went along with it.”

JK

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John Kiley

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The Children of the Counterculture By John Rothchild and Susan Berns Wolf Doubleday, 207 pp., $7.95 This is a story by and about two people who can’t handle their two little kids. They are bigger and smarter (he a former managing editor of the Yale Daily News; she a Bennington girl), and they have all the money. But the kids have all the power, and use it constantly to rip off the adults. Are we heading for another domestic tragedy? Not quite. These two lucky kids, by the grace of God and a contract from Doubleday, get run through the ex-Spock facto communes from Miami to California and back and presto! no more problems. It’s all here for the kids to read 15 years from now and demand equal time from the publisher.

The authors have this fear, see, you discipline a kid, he hates you forever or longer like Captain Ahab the white whale and vice versa. Commune parents, they discover, have no such fear about tomorrow: “the only important question was whether the little girl was being a bitch right now, or the little boy a brat right now.” It was a marvelously sudden coming-to-wisdom for the authors: no two-semester seminar with term papers on Bettelheim. Just Melanie, the commune parent, taking command of Bernsie, the authors’ having-a-fit city kid. ‘We don’t cop to that behavior,’ [she said] and took Berns back to the car, ushered her inside, and told her, ‘Don’t come out till you shape up.’ Nobody had ever done that to Berns. We were stunned. It was one thing for this woman to comment on Susan’s permissiveness, but now she had taken control of the children and was using our car as a prison. At best, it was a totally impetuous intrusion on our parental rights, and, at worst, it was an emotional kidnapping. But Melanie was so sure of herself that for some reason we went along with it.”