Let 'em Eat Cake.(Review)

As Good As I Could Be: A Memoir of Raising Wonderful Children in Difficult Times, by Susan Cheever (Simon & Schuster, 192 pp., $23)

Having thrown out all the old rules about raising children, today's parents must "make it up as they go along"-which leaves a lot of room for mistakes. Susan Cheever has been appropriately terrified, since she first gave birth to a daughter 18 years ago, that she might not get it right. Her well-written memoir about being a parent-a sequel to her previous bestseller about being a child of novelist John Cheever-speaks to the experience of many raised in the '60s and '70s, who now have children themselves.

Typical of the '60s intelligentsia, Cheever's parents optimistically believed their children knew best, and jettisoned their role as authority figures: "There were never any limits on where I could go or what I could do. My parents seemed to believe that I knew how to behave as well as they did." Susan's school did not share this belief, and she was "almost kicked out" for violating rules she contemptuously found absurd. Happily, she was transferred to the Woodstock Country School, where they let her do what she wanted. Cheever herself later became a teacher at a similar alternative school, believing that "the key to teaching was to abdicate the fortress of phony authority." But when she became a parent she discovered, to her great surprise, that kids are "hungry for rules" and "want order."

Cheever is not advocating a return to the ways of our grandparents- which she says have been destroyed forever, "for good and evil," over the last twenty years. Instead she proclaims that today's child-rearing generation has been given the task of "reinventing parenthood." Our grandparents ruled by "divine right," but we must create "loving authority," which is "flexible and humorous." Cheever seems to believe that before 1960 all children were treated like Oliver Twist: "They were whipped if they disobeyed. Their schools were more like prisons than playgrounds."

As a psychologist (and father), I have observed that today's parents operate under two fallacious and mutually contradictory assumptions, both apparent in this book. On the one hand, they believe that children are little adults, fully capable of reasoned judgments about their behavior. On the other, they believe that children are simply big infants, incapable of tolerating even the most minor frustration.

While Cheever decries the "little adult" fallacy in principle, her behavior suggests that she buys into it. When her daughter announced in fifth grade that she was going to become a witch, Cheever, as she proudly recounts, not only tolerated this decision but allowed her daughter to build an altar in the closet. When her daughter's father and stepmother banned witchcraft from their apartment, her daughter decided "with much heartbreak all around-she didn't want to spend the night there anymore." Since when do ten-year-old girls have the power to divorce their fathers-conveniently, when he enforces rules she doesn't like? Cheever did her daughter no favor granting her this destructive power. When we give children control over adult decisions, they feel out of control.

When Cheever does set a limit, she does it like other modern parents, with neurotic ambivalence and self-doubt. When she was five, her daughter wanted to ...