Sometimes, their parents seem simply overwhelmed and unable to cope--and, as I'll suggest later, the social and economic situation of the middle class today has made this a disturbingly common condition. But there is often more involved. For many of these parents, this inversion of responsibility is not simply a reaction forced on them by external pressures: it is what they believe is right. It reflects their broader views about responsibility and mutuality, and they justify it in a variety of ways. On the simplest level, parents may explain their willingness to abandon the parental role on the ground that the child is just too much trouble for them to handle-even the cause of the family's problems. The parents may complain that they are too fragile to deal with a child who is so burdensome. More frequently, the justifications draw on deeper cultural themes-ideologies about the proper role of parents and, beyond that, the proper place of "help" and support in general. The withdrawal from commitment to their children is rooted in a thin and ultimately self-serving individualism: they believe that children need to learn to "make good choices," and making good choices is not something that anyone else can do for them. They believe that it is bad for children (as for adults) to be given too much help in dealing with life, and they often complain that their own children make demands for nurturance and tolerance at a level that, in their view, parents should not have to provide.

I recently read something by a woman who was complaining about the "fundamentalists" (whether religious or otherwise, I wasn't certain) who questioned how she dealt with her ten year old son's trouble with his homework. Rather than ask whether he had homework and require that he do it, or sit and help him with it, or make herself available for assistance if he needed it, her perspective was simple. It was his homework; he needed to be responsible for doing it. If he didn't, it was his job to go to school and tell his teacher that he hadn't done it. Besides, she had her own things that needed her attention.

Now, admittedly, parents need to teach their children about responsibility. What Currie seems to be driving at is this: we don't teach kids to be responsible by telling them they should be responsible and then leaving them to their own devices. We teach them to be responsible by mirroring that practice with them, until it becomes second nature. In other words, we're "permissive" in the sense that we tell children to essentially go do their "own thing" or handle their affairs "on their own," and then we become punitive upon their failure. Which child is likely to be willing to do homework: the one whose parent is willing to offer advice and assistance when the child clearly needs it, or one whose parents expect the child to do it on his own and will punish him or publicly embarrass him for his failure? Viewed in this light, what many regard as "permissive" might actually be regarded as an abdication by the parent and a shuttling of responsibility prematurely onto the child.