Parents Forever: You and Your Adult Children.

Sidney Callahan is often ahead of the curve. Back in 1965, she wrote a book about working mothers before most of the rest of us realized there was a problem. Now Callahan focuses on relations between parents and their adult children, land-mined emotional territory which is usually uncharted by the folks who churn out guidebooks on family life.

Callahan's title, Parents Forever, could be mistaken for a Mormon tract. Mormon doctrine, it will be remembered, teaches that marriage lasts for all eternity (God himself is married) and that those who are lucky enough to become gods themselves will spend the hereafter propagating "spirit children." Those of us who look forward to eternal rest and recreation can only pray the Mormons have it wrong on both counts. (Even Mormons, though, don't envision spirit children becoming heavenly adolescents.) These days, earthly parenthood alone seems to last an eternity. And that's Callahan's point: parents are never really relieved of parental concerns. We worry that our children will never cross the receding threshold of adulthood, then worry when they do. Anxiety, thy names are Mom and Dad. Which may be one reason why so many young adults are putting off parenthood until the last biological moment - or skipping that phase of life altogether.

This is a book for the Moonstruck generation: for parents who remember a time when relations between adult children and their parents were eased by established conventions (not the least of which were shared meals, as in the film, where intergenerational problems and sibling spats were absorbed and often healed over the breaking of bread) and who have lived to see most of those conventions frayed, if not altogether unraveled, by enormous changes in sex, marriage, and the family over the last three decades. It is especially helpful for parents who admire but cannot duplicate George Bush's extended family, want no part of Ronald Reagan's fractured family, and are properly dubious about the Clintons' "lifestyle partnership."

Callahan writes from the parental perspective; her voice, thank God, belongs more to the mother of six adult children than to the professor of social psychology. Which is to say her advice throughout is wise, humorous, and speaks with the only authority that counts - experience. My own copy now bears the marks that only really good books deserve: underlined passages on almost every page.

These days, parents and adult children can expect to spend as much as sixty years living separately together. How well they get along depends on many variables. Callahan wisely reminds parents that they need not like the adults their children turned out to be in order to provide the "attentiveness, empathy, and the will to further the well-being" of their offspring. Nor should they wonder why bad children happen to good parents and vice versa; even the best parenthood carries no warranties for parts or service. Good parents, she writes, have the task of encouraging in their maturing children "movement toward a grown-up family of equally competent adults who can found homes of their own if they choose."

For most middle-class Americans, her audience, the ideal arrangement is "separate households in a cooperative family network." Although it is traditional for parents to want to advantage the next generation's "social well-being," Callahan rightly warns parents to resist trying to gratify "adult children who think themselves automatically entitled to an upscale standard of living it took parents a lifetime of hard work to achieve." When grown but only nominally adult children return to the parental nest, Callahan resolves the problem of who sets household standards in favor of parents: "Parents do not assert their claims to authority solely on the grounds of age, property rights, or because they have more money, but because it is morally right that whoever has founded a family and put in years of committed effort gets to set the rules."

If parents are always parents, children are always, well, their children - which means that emotional conflicts are to be anticipated across the life cycle. Callahan has one basic rule for how to decide what to do or say when conflicts arise: treat your children better than you would your best friend. Tact, patience, and the old monastic "discipline of the tongue" are the virtues she counsels and exemplifies.

In a book of such modest length, Callahan manages to anticipate and discuss a variety of issues which confront families as parents and children readjust to aging, independence, and new forms of connection. How should parents react when their adult children shirk hard work; reject inherited religious beliefs; marry a slob; divorce; decide not to have children (grandchildren); opt for the other political party; or announce their homosexuality? On these and other painful subjects, there is no better book than Callahan's. If there is one subject she could have developed more thoroughly, it is the idea of leisure. How children and parents spend their time when it is theirs alone to spend says more, I suspect, about who those people are than what kind of work they do or how they handle sex.

Callahan is, as she says, optimistic about the future of the family. That is fresh air indeed in an age where dysfunctional families are the only kind most books address. Had the Bush and Clinton folks read Callahan first, we all might have been treated to an elevated discussion of family values.