Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 7, 1992 TAG: 9201070160
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DREW JUBERA COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
OFFSPRING OF FLOWER CHILDREN: BLOOM, NOT BLIGHT
"We were not normal," says Matthew Shorthouse, smiling but not joking.Shorthouse, 22, is seated in the rambling Atlanta house that was once ground zero for a '70s commune called the Z Fellowship, and where he still lives. A "No Nukes" poster hangs on one wall; a "One Home, One Family" poster with a picture of the Earth is near the front door.
This is where Matthew and three siblings grew up with as many as 13 other sharing, '60s-style liberals - a household that Matthew's mother, Jeanne Shorthouse, says was viewed by many before the commune broke up in the early '80s as "an extension of the Atlanta Zoo."
"It was an incredibly loving family, and I'd like to teach my son some of the same ethics I grew up with," adds Shorthouse, who has a 2-year-old whom he supports financially but does not live with. "But I'd like to live in the country. I had enough living with someone else - let alone 10 other people."
Shorthouse is part of an emerging generation of children born to counterculture parents - the blooms of what mainstream America once considered its perplexing crop of flower children. These were the kids who during the '60s and '70s were viewed as human curiosities - kids whose tradition-busting upbringings either were going to turn them into future disasters or create through them a special, more advanced generation.
"The counterculture was seen first as a political movement, and then as a personal freedom movement," says Thomas Weisner, a UCLA anthropology professor who studied children from 150 countercultural families. "But that's not the whole story. These people had private lives; they got married and had kids."
As it turns out, according to Dr. Weisner's study, both the hopes and fears about many of these children's futures were largely overblown.
In 1974, Dr. Weisner and his colleagues on the Lifestyle Project at UCLA identified countercultural mothers-to-be - pregnant women living in communes or those who came to urban health clinics in California. He compared these families against a "straight," more mainstream control group of 52 families. He gathered data such as school performance and social problems through 1986, when the children were 12. He is trying to get funding for a follow-up.
Among the findings:
86 percent of the counterculture children were above the national median in grades and test scores.
Their IQ scores averaged 113, a point less than the control group's, but higher than the national norm of 100.
17 percent had substance-abuse and psychological problems, compared with about 10 percent of the general population.
But Weisner says the results actually deviate little from the norm. He attributes higher school performance and IQ scores largely to counterculture parents who tended to have higher education levels and IQs than the general population. Behavioral problems are not significantly different from those in more mainstream families, he says, considering the greater incidence of "unstable" adults who attached themselves to counterculture groups in the first place.
His conclusion: There's no evidence that these children are not turning out as well or better than their peers, a conclusion he says largely vindicates their parents' lifestyles.
"It shows the protective effect of strong values and moral commitment of the parents," he says. "Many of them did some eccentric things that otherwise might have done some damage. But if the parents were committed and thought what they were doing had some moral value, it offered protection to their children, even though many of them had turmoil in their lives."
Though it's not known how many children were born in communes or to other unconventional families, Weisner says their numbers are smaller than all the media attention on the counterculture would lead one to believe.
Yet it's clear from talking to a random sampling of these children that most of them feel bonded by their uncommon upbringings.
"Most of us have just kind of disappeared into mainstream society, yet each of us carries with him a certain amount of baggage even as we do our normal things," says Lenny Jordan, who at 39 is among the first wave of these children.
Jordan grew up on Koinonia, a Georgia commune his father founded in the 1940s - a controversial, Christian-based community of up to as many as 60 people that during the '50s and '60s experienced violent attacks from locals because of its integrated population.
For many of these children - most of whom lived only parts of their lives in extreme countercultural settings such as communes - their reactions to the experience went through phases. As youngsters, they usually were oblivious to their own radical lifestyles and enjoyed the freedom and abundant companionship such settings offered. "It was like living out 10 years of summer camp," recalls Jan Zehr, Jordan's oldest sister, who now sells computer software in Indiana.
So what others viewed as outrageous, they thought of as normal.
It didn't occur to most of these children that they were different until they went outside their self-contained circles.
"It changed as I went to school," says Alice Fike, 18, who was born on The Farm in Tennessee, which her parents helped found in 1971 after moving from the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, then hippiedom's epicenter. When she was 5, Alice moved with her family to Atlanta, and says her first days of school required unforeseen adjustments.
"I would try to give everyone a hug," she recalls. "Everyone thought that was strange, so I quit doing that. And when I called my parents by their first names, people asked if I was adopted."
Others recall being reluctant to bring friends home.
"By the time I got to fifth grade, it was obvious my parents were different, and our living situation was different," says Elizabeth Shorthouse, 25. "If you brought somebody to the house, you'd have to explain why all these people were there that weren't related to you. So I just didn't bring them home much."
For some, exposure to more mainstream lifestyles caused bewilderment, or resentment against the lifestyle in which their parents were raising them.
"I just didn't like it," says Bryan Swift, 13, who moved to Atlanta two years ago with his sister and mother, who raised the children for much of their lives in a hippie-style, back-to-the-earth community in Virginia. He recalls sneaking candy bars at school or from his grandmother (sugar was strictly forbidden at home), and after years of vegetarianism, wanting to eat hamburger almost every day. Now even his goals are different.
"I don't plan on doing anything like that [living on a commune]," Bryan says. "I'm going to be rich and famous and wealthy."
"I'm cynical about the Farm," says Fike. "I think it was an interesting idea, but it didn't really work. I'm more interested in clothes and money."
But while others also harbor degrees of cynicism about the diehard liberalism in which they were raised, and have abandoned many of the outward trappings of their countercultural upbringings, they have retained a different kind of radicalism. Weisner calls it a "questioning orientation."
"Things are questioned by these kids that for most kids are just done," he says. "What they all share is what they shared in their homes - a continuing questioning of the status quo."