Escape From Childhood

hat we need is to recreate the extended family. Or rather, we need to allow, encourage, and help young people create extended families of their own. There is no reason why the adult friends of a child should be friends of his parents. Parents generally want friends like themselves. Children may like more variety so that they may get some things from one person and some things from another

If there is nothing in a family but feelings, if it is only an arena for feelings, if its life depends on everyone feeling good about or loving everyone else, if the members have no other way of being really useful to each other, then it is constantly threatened by anything that might upset the good feelings, and perfectly normal differences and quarrels take on too much importance

The family is so dependent on these high-powered feelings, so shut in on itself, so non-involved with others or with the community, so devoid of purposes outside of itself, that it is fragile, easily threatened by a quarrel

All of this we have destroyed, everything has a cause, nothing has a meaning. The universe is a machine set mysteriously into motion a long time ago and slowly running down, and we are little machines running down in it. Meanwhile the world around us changes ever faster, so that the past itself disappears, loses its significance. Margaret Mead said not long ago that today the young know much more about the world in many ways than their elders

Not only is the modern nuclear family a very bad model of adult and social life, because it is so incomplete and distorted, but it is its isolation from the world that creates the need for models

Cures for old evils sooner or later create new ones.

By now I have come to feel that the fact of being a “child,” of being wholly subservient and dependent, of being seen by older people as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave, and superpet, does most young people more harm than good.