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Larkin

The other day my sister Laurie was complaining about her kids and their brazen insolence. "They're little kids, and they're already saying things to me that you and I would never have said to Mom, even as teenagers!" It's the gratuitous insult, like her six-year-old telling her she looks old. Or it's simple disobedience, a point-blank refusal to do this or that.

I sympathized. On the gratuitous-insult side, Larkin has been in a fervent state of dad-rejection for weeks. I'll go to her room in the morning, only to have her inform me, "I don't like you. I want Mommy." Then, just in case I didn't get her drift: "Go into your office, Dad! I never want to see you again!"

It's easy enough not to take that kind of thing seriously. Less easy are the confrontations, the whining, the spastic falling-to-the-floor rages, the impudent testing of limits. One of my images of Lark these days is watching her pour her juice box out onto the dining room table as she stares right at me.

Laurie and I laughed to imagine what our mother would have done with that kind of behavior. But then I pondered it. "What would she have done?" I asked. "Lock us in the closet? Hit us? I mean, how did she and Dad get us to be such obedient children?"

"It wasn't any actual punishment," my sister said. "It's just that we were afraid of them."

Which is interesting. Because on the whole our parents were affable, loving, open and fair with us, and anything but authoritarian. So what was this fear?

Mulling this over took me back to my brief stint, post-college, as a high school English teacher. My classes were informal and boisterous - sometimes too much so. In comparison I recall an older colleague, a history teacher, who had his students totally under his control. While my students liked me, his respected him. All he had to do was stand in front of them and be silent, and soon they would be silent. I tried to figure out where this respect came from. It wasn't just that they were afraid of him, I decided -- though that was part of it. It was that they couldn't see through him. At some level he remained strange to them, unfamiliar. He was the opposite of transparent. He was opaque.

In a similar way, I think, people of my parents' generation remained more opaque to their children than we do today. There was a big gap between their world and ours. Today the rituals and rhetoric of parenting are less formal. It is the rare friend who introduces Molly and me as "Mr." and "Mrs." to his or her kids. Being on a first-name basis with their parents' friends is the norm for kids in our circle.

There are other ways we've closed that gap between parents and children. In the two-working-parent family, diminished time spent with your kids boosts the value of intimacy in the time you do have. My parents rarely came to my Little League games. Now most of my friends go to all of their kids baseball and soccer games. Today's parents are far more affectionate, too. At three I doubt I was sitting on my mother's lap every morning at breakfast, and I know I wasn't sitting on my father's lap. My parents talked less with us than Molly and I do with Larkin. They talked less openly about other adults. And they never fought in front of us. They kept their disagreements, whatever they were, behind closed doors. But couples these days tend to have their stresses and fights right out in front. Kids see adult flaws and vulnerabilities much more clearly.

Popular culture has changed as well, the way it models parents and children together. Recently I picked up a DVD of a TV cartoon series I loved as a five-year-old. Clutch Cargo detailed the adventures of a Hemingwayesque writer and pilot with his boy, Spinner, and faithful dog, Paddlefoot. Created in the late 1950s, it used a laughably primitive animation technology, and from today's perspective its family role modeling seems just as primitive. As Clutch heads into the wilderness to corral a gang of timber thieves, Spinner sits alongside, watching in wonder, thrilled by a glimpse into the man's world of action and risk. The father is muscular, stoical, and silent. Paternal love consists in protecting your child from the tough world out there even as you prepare him for it; a child's love returns worship tinged with awe.

In contrast, we parents today have opted for friendliness, tenderness, laughter, and lots of language: in a word, familiarity. But familiarity breeds contempt; and the traditionalist critique of companionate parenting accuses it of failing to create the respect that children need and inwardly crave. When your toddler shouts "No!" right in your face, you can't help wondering whether the critique might be right. Yes, you use every tool at your disposal: you cajole and reason; offer both positive and negative reinforcement; dispense time-outs; and on and on. But having "tools" isn't the same as having authority. Part of you -- part of me, anyway -- longs to be Clutch Cargo, infallible, invulnerable, and unchallengeable.

Of course, Clutch is a cartoon, a fantasy; and for the most part, I believe that the trade-offs contemporary parents have made are worthwhile ones. Still, I wonder: If familiarity breeds contempt, what breeds authority? What is the respect that lies beyond mere fear? What, really, does Larkin need from me, beyond food, shelter, love and some help in learning how to treat others?

These aren't necessarily questions to be answered right now. They're more points of curiosity and reference for the longer run. In any case, I suspect there isn't much a parent can do, other than be loving, be firm, and try to embody, as well as you can, what you hope to impart.