NOW THEY WANT YOUR KIDS

By ANDREW FERGUSON

In case you haven't noticed, the baby boomers are having families these days. But of course you've noticed. According to the boomer law of cultural tyranny, if the boomers are having families, then we must all turn our attention to the problems of families. Newspapers, magazines, advertising and especially politics are consumed with the subject. Baby boomers have even invented a verb to describe this new craze: "to parent," which suggests the rearing of children is just another one of life's many options--a means of self-fulfillment like mountain biking or enrolling in a clogging class.

With so many affluent, culturally aware parents busy parenting, it's no wonder authors have been busy authoring, cashing in with truckloads of books about you and your child. The trend has even touched the fluffiest genre of nonfiction, the self-help book. Commercially, the match is a natural; intellectually, it's problematic. A self-help book about child rearing is almost an oxymoron. Self-help literature, as the name implies, proceeds from a claustrophobic obsession with self--how to improve the self, how to make the self feel better about itself and, pre-eminently, how to make the self rich. But being a parent renders self-absorption impossible. Having kids may improve the self, but only incidentally, and the self never feels worse than when it stumbles out of bed for the 4 a.m. feeding. And as boomers are discovering, parenthood tends not to make you rich (unless you spawn the Jackson Five, which probably isn't worth it).

Intellectual contradictions have never stopped the self-help gurus in the past, of course. And so three of them are publishing new books to apply their wisdom to the untidy art of being a mom and a dad. The titles give the game away. These books are franchise extenders--knockoffs from a successful product line. Elaine St. James, author of last year's Simplify Your Life, now tells us to Simplify Your Life with Kids (Andrews McMeel Publishing; $14.95). Stephen Covey, who has lobotomized a generation of business executives with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, offers The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families (Golden Books; $25). And Deepak Chopra, having discovered that The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success will make you, or at least him, rich, returns for another helping with The Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents (Harmony Books; $16.95).

St. James' book is by far the best of the lot. Her earlier hymns to "simplicity" trademarked a special brand of neo-Puritan party poopery--don't shop for fun, move into a smaller house, throw out all credit cards but one--that nevertheless appealed to people whose lives seemed to move from one hassle to another. And since parenthood is the greatest hassle of all (as well as--obligatory disclaimer--delightful, magical, etc.), the method holds. Some of her tips are obvious: keep a master calendar showing your kids' appointments, stock your car with snacks and paper towels. Others are difficult but doable: "It's unrealistic to feel that you can get everything...for your child... Avoid the temptation to buy all those adorable things you think you'd like to have." Some are impossible: "Keep your sense of humor." (Thank you, but we have other plans.)

Simplify Your Life with Kids is straightforwardly written, without gimmicks or jargon, and shows some familiarity with the real world. In all this it is an atypical self-help book. Stephen Covey, on the other hand, has the format down cold. His genius is for complicating the obvious, and as a result his books are graphically chaotic. Charts and diagrams bulge from the page. Sidebars and boxes chop the chapters into bite-size morsels. The prose buzzes with the cant phrases--empower, modeling, bonding, agent of change--without which his books would deflate like a blown tire. He uses more exclamation points than Gidget.

Covey's seven habits were initially intended for skittish business folk willing to try something, anything, to goose the bottom line. They pay large sums for his seminars and videotapes, in which he advises them, for example, to figure out what they want to do before they do it ("Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind") and to do the important things before the unimportant things ("Habit 3: Put first things first"). America's corporate managers are notoriously gullible, of course, and the money they spend on a self-designated "leadership authority" like Covey is usually not their own. But parents are supposed to be harder to fool. By transplanting his wisdom into the burgeoning field of family books, he's betting they aren't. He may be right.

His own family has already succumbed. Covey offers family testimonials, many from the Covey kids themselves, and it turns out--brace yourself--that old pop is pretty terrific. "His idealism," writes his wife in an effusive foreword, "inspires me, the people he teaches and our children; it makes us want to achieve and lift ourselves and others." Not since The Waltons has America seen a family so well adjusted. "We wanted our children to work in school and get as much education as possible," Covey writes. "We focused primarily on learning, not grades, and we hardly ever had to encourage the children to do their homework. We rarely saw a grade lower than A minus."

The little dears! But, you ask, what about the rest of us? The habits are open to all, Covey insists, but if you want to hop aboard, be warned that you will end up talking like this, from an anonymous testimonial that Covey reprints: "With habits 4, 5 and 6, my husband and I are seeking each other's exploration." Or this, from a dad whose daughter had a temper tantrum: "I consciously helped provide her with experiences where synergy really worked. And this enabled her to develop the courage and belief that if she pushed her own pause button and hung in there with us, it would pay off." The daughter is seven years old.

You may have trouble keeping the habits straight in any case. Covey's teaching is, to put it mildly, highly schematic. The 7 Habits begat the three primary laws of love, which are not to be confused with the four primary laws of life. There are four unique human gifts and three common mistakes and...but who's counting? A reader who can hack through this verbiage will realize soon enough that it serves only to obscure old-fashioned notions that have sustained families since they first wandered out of the Serengeti. Think before you speak. Plan ahead. Try to see the other guy's point of view. Tell the truth. If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything. Moderation in all things. To thine own self be true. And so on.

Covey is a New Age Polonius, and like the original he's harmless enough and maybe even does some good. It's hard to make the same claim for Chopra, whose advice for parents never strays far from the soupy narcissism of his self-help blockbusters, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind and Quantum Healing. Like those, The Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents is a greeting card teased out to resemble a book. His fans will find nothing new here. Skeptics will at first be puzzled by his non sequiturs and airy banalities. Then they will be horrified.

Since Chopra disdains the concrete and the specific, one can never be completely sure what he's driving at, but it's clear he has little familiarity with family life as most Americans live it. He offers few examples to illustrate his points, but it's not hard to come up with some of your own. Your three-year-old has taken to drinking out of the toilet? Consult Chopra: "Acceptance is essential because a lot of effort is wasted whenever you put up resistance." Your preteen is making balloon animals with the condoms she got from the school nurse? Chill out. "A complete vision of life must include the realization that anything and everything is destined to happen, and our role is to remain open to uncertainty and surprise." Your 13-year-old is getting sized for a tongue stud? "If you have taught your child to heed her own silence, there is no peril in letting her go out into the world no longer a child."

Family life holds the promise of at last rousing baby boomers from their generational solipsism--turning them from their obsessions with their own feelings to the well-being of their children. And indeed, lurking beneath the glibness of Covey and St. James is the understanding that being a parent involves sacrifice, discipline and self-denial. Chopra is having none of that. His is the old-time Me-decade religion, 100 proof. In Chopra's idealized world, having kids is just another occasion to luxuriate in the warm bubble bath of self. Children, he writes, let us "learn the Seven Spiritual Laws through them." How nice. If only we didn't have to drive them to soccer practice.