on Adulthood

We will never have a firm grasp of how to raise children until we have come to some collective understanding of what it means, morally as well as occupationally, to be an adult.  One of the things that the dropouts and other misfits of the 60s were trying to tell the grown-up world was that the available models of adulthood were not acceptable - at least not to young people who had learned to distinguish the worthy from the absurd.

- Barbara Ehrenreich, reviewing Bruno Bettleheim's book A Good Enough Parent, New York Times Book Review, May 24, 1987

Bruno Bettleheim comments on the fairy tale Rapunzel, in his book, "The Uses of Enchantment"

In the story, after Rapunzel's banishment into the desert, the time comes when she is no longer taken care of by her substitute mother, nor the prince by his parents. Both of them now have to learn to take care of themselves, even in the most adverse circumstances. Their relative immaturity is suggested by their having given up hope -- not trusting the future really means not trusting oneself. That is why neither the prince nor Rapunzel is able to search with determination for the other. He, we are told, "wandered blindly through the forest, ate nothing but roots and berries, and did nothing but moan and cry because he had lost his beloved." Nor are we told that Rapunzel did much of a positive nature; she too lived in misery and moaned and decried her fate. We must assume, nevertheless, that it was for both a period of growing, of finding themselves, an era of recovery. At its end they are ready not only to rescue each other, but to make a good life, one for the other.