PARENTAL GUIDANCE SUGGESTED

By LANCE MORROW

Imagine that the clouds had parted above Cheyenne, and that Jessica had powered up into the frictionless blue and sailed like a gull on thermals all the way to Cape Cod--had wheeled there, and floated back across America, borne aloft now on the nation's cheers, across the Rockies to California, where she would touch down and climb grinning from the cockpit, and ride on her father's shoulders through a tumult of television cameras and microphones, and would do the Today show live with Katie, and talk to Bill Clinton from the White House.

Americans have sometimes sought a kind of moral cleansing in children's adventures (Tom Sawyer's, to start with). It is part of an American theology of redemption by kids--a sentimental reassertion of the nation's conception of its own innocence. It is especially important to stage such pageants when Americans are feeling dirty about something. Jessica Dubroff's adventure--a Disney story of redemption by a seven-year-old, a '90s remake of Shirley Temple playing Charles Lindbergh--might have worked as a gaudy, cute, uplifting antidote to the shaming mess of the Simpson trial.

But there was no good ending to Jessica's flight, and it is cruel to conjure one up. Instead of the parade, we have a chapter in the history of American carelessness.

There was, so to speak, the proximate cause: the fatal stupidity of allowing an overweight four-seater Cessna to take off, in thin mountain air, into the violence of an early spring thunderstorm. But if it had been three adults who died as a result of that decision, the crash would have merited 10 seconds on the local news in Denver.

The real fascination and disgust turned on the idea of putting a seven-year-old at the controls (even with a qualified adult pilot watching her). The Catholic Church states that a child of seven has reached "the age of reason." The parents of most seven-year-olds will not say that "reason" is the first word that springs to mind. If Jessica had completed the flight in triumph, only a few would have muttered, "I'm glad it worked, but they took a hell of a chance." After the crash, the nation asked, virtually in chorus, "Were they crazy, putting a kid that age in charge of a plane?"

The father is dead and cannot defend himself. Jessica's mother, a New Age spiritual healer, gave television interviews after the crash. She said of her last conversation with Jessica just before the girl throttled back into the storm: "She just was so present with the beauty of the rain."

It was difficult not to be furious at the airheadedness vocabulary and a sort of breezy California child-worship and irresponsibility among those who were supposed to be the adults. Someone had obviously caught the virus from the '60s that disabled grownup functions.

It was hard not to say, All right, let's go through this again. The parent is the grownup, right? The one with the duty to love and protect the distinctly different one, called child; the grownup is the one who says no. Understood? It is not enough for a child to want something. The parent is supposed to decide whether it's a good idea--whether, above all, it is safe.

America is divided between those who hated the '60s and those who loved them. I hated the '60s, while welcoming some of the changes they brought churning along with them. In any case, it is not entirely feckless nostalgia to say that the last age of real American parental responsibility was the age of Eisenhower, after which (as the boomers thought) adults became disreputable and untrustworthy (Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon). The deconstruction of American public authority in the Vietnam years left boundaries eroded and crumbling. Individual roles melted into one another. Older distinctive identities and purposes grew confused. Men and women interchange roles on a horizontal axis. Children and parents switch places on the vertical. Too many of the parents never abandoned their wistfully self-cherishing idea of themselves as children.

Cotton Mather's daughter Nanny fell into the fire and burned herself. Mather cried, "Alas, for my sins the just God throws my child into the fire!" The child was a moral adjunct mingling with the Puritan's internal devils. With equal unrealism, some American parents today envision their children as geniuses or angels. Wanda Kaczynski, of course, represented the style of an older generation of parents, but her child rearing bore traces of the obsessive. Later American parents sometimes have a tendency to practice a retro-projection that amounts to a search for their own lost, sweet, brilliant, childish selves. They indulge in a manic idealization of their young; it is the obverse of child battering but sometimes has equally fatal effects. The idealization too savors of some indirect exhibitionism that, seen in a brutal light, comes just short of amounting to child sacrifice.

Of course every day there are grownups who do horrible things to children. Why blame a mother and father who wanted to let their very young daughter fly back and forth across the country and have everyone fall in love with her? All right, but be careful of parents who produce and direct their children's dreams.