Nostalgia for 1960s counterculture is everywhere – on Instagram, TV and in fashion. But what was life really like for the children of hippy parents?

It’s not easy being a child of the revolution. While hippies sought to explore alternative ways of living through a spiritual quest for enlightenment and mind-altering drugs, their children weren’t always thrilled to be the guinea pigs in child rearing experiments. In most depictions, hippy kids face a whole spectrum of issues as a result of their parents’ decisions to embrace alternative lifestyles, with mild packed-lunch embarrassment at one end and severe neglect at the other. “You could hear people having orgasmic sex all the time. All night, like mating baboons, gibbons,” Noa Maxwell told this newspaper, recounting his experience of growing up in the ashram featured in the recent Netflix documentary Wild, Wild Country. When he was six, he got accidentally stoned eating a hash brownie. “If you have no boundaries in your life the world is quite scary,” he reflected.

It’s only natural that the children of the counterculture are ambivalent about its demise. The terrifying lack of structure Maxwell mentions is, for others, a manifestation of ecstatic freedom. The 1999 non-fiction book Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture, portrays a broad range of views, with some contributors, such as Elizabeth Shé, completely rejecting their parents’ values: “The free love movement,” she wrote, “set me up for a lifetime of sexual, emotional and physical abuse.” Moon Unit Zappa, daughter of musician Frank, writes in the foreword that the lack of boundaries in her house gave her an “awful floating feeling … I craved rituals and rules like my friends had.” Yet other hippy kids are tenderly nostalgic for the lives their parents chose.

Writers have been interrogating the counterculture since its inception, a time when it seemed, if only briefly, that the world could change. For later generations it is often mythologised even further, steeped in a pseudo-nostalgia palpable in everything from Instagram filters to bell sleeves, macramé plant holders and the renewed popularity of tarot. Emma Cline’s 2016 bestseller The Girls, a fictionalised tale of how a teenage girl is absorbed by the Manson family, garnered a reported $2m advance. Emily Fridlund’s History of Wolves, whose heroine Linda lives in a dying commune in Minnesota, was shortlisted for last year’s Man Booker prize, and this summer Paulo Coelho’s latest novel Hippie is inspired by the author’s visit to Kathmandu on the Magic Bus.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ashram life in the Netflix TV series Wild, Wild Country. Photograph: Netflix

The era certainly holds a personal interest. I spent my early childhood in a co-op house in north London that began life as a squat and this prompted a lifelong interest in the counterculture. My first novel, The Tyranny of Lost Things, is set against the backdrop of the London squatting and co‑operative housing movements of the 1970s and 80s. Whole crescents of crumbling Victorian houses were taken over by hippies, punks and dropouts and then mostly demolished; with what claimed to be London’s last commune, in Islington Park Street, holding out until 2016, after which its members were evicted. My novel follows protagonist Harmony’s attempt to come to terms with a childhood that was loving, but also marked by trauma. I was interested in what happens when the child is placed in an environment that she has not chosen, and that has long-lasting psychological effects. To what extent can blame be levelled against such parents?

As well as historical accounts my research took in novelistic portrayals of hippy parent-child relationships. One classic portrayal is Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud, published in 1992. In it her narrator reflects on how in the 1960s she was taken, along with her older sister Bea, to Morocco by “Mum”, who was on a quest for spiritual enlightenment. Mum abandons her older daughter in Marrakech so she can go off with her youngest to study Sufism. Though the narrator makes no judgment on her mother’s parenting, as readers we are left feeling sympathy for these hungry, confused children who have been wrenched from their home. During a visit to a mountain village the narrator asks Bea if she would like to be a shepherd:

“No, not really.” “What would you like to be then?” “I don’t know. Normal, I think.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Carrie Mullan, Kate Winslet and Bella Rizza in the film adaptation of Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky (1998). Photograph: Allstar/BBC

The children in Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins hardly fare better. It’s the mid-1970s, and Sun and Moon’s mother is Viola, who has dropped out of her upper-middle class life to live in a commune. She is a terrible mother: “She wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen a baby, let alone held one, and imagined it would be like getting a cat, or at worst, a puppy.” Nor is father figure Dominic a great parent: “He lived off benefits, which was cool, he said, because it meant the ‘Stalinist state’ was paying for him to produce art.” “They think I’m a waster, I think they’re fascists,” he says, of his own parents. Sunny, meanwhile, is deeply damaged. Having had a tantrum on a beach trip (“you never give us nice things”) he goes missing:

“A fractious Sunny has to be prised off the woman in the Lost Children hut like a limpet from a rock. ‘The poor little pet,’ the woman said, and Viola said, ‘You can keep him if you want,” which obviously the Lost-Children-hut woman thought was a joke.”

Viola comes to regret her shoddy parenting, but is never fully redeemed:



Whenever Viola thought about Sunny she was gripped with panic. He’d already made a half-hearted attempt at suicide. He was too apathetic to actually kill himself though. Wasn’t he? What if he did? The panic tightened a grip on her heart. She had failed Sunny and she had no idea what to do about it.

Sunny, for his part, becomes a yoga instructor in Bali: “Viola hadn’t seen Sunny for nearly ten years and in the interim he had turned into a complete human being (‘Perhaps the two things aren’t unrelated,’ Bertie said.)”

Not all portrayals of hippy upbringings are so damning. Marina Lewycka’s Various Pets Alive and Dead (2012) and Joe Dunthorne’s Wild Abandon (2011) both portray eccentric but ultimately loving hippy parents whose offspring are bemused but not severely damaged by their odd lifestyle choices. In the former, son Serge drops out of his PhD to secretly become a banker, while daughter Clara is a teacher struggling to mentor her pupils:

“Don’t worry,” she’d say, “you can escape. Look, I don’t live in a commune now. I live in a lovely modern flat in Sheffield with a clean bathroom all to myself … One day you can grow up and choose your own life.”

Wild Abandon, which is set in a contemporary commune in Wales, also mines bohemian eccentricity for laughs. Eleven-year-old son of the commune Albert is obsessed with Doomsday scenarios, while 16-year-old Kate flees to suburbia. “I’ll put on some make-up and pretend not to be your mother,” says Freya, desperate to meet her daughter’s boyfriend.

Some parent-child narratives reveal trauma and neglect, others raw, unmediated love

Perhaps as a result of British cynicism, we have to turn to American fiction to see more wistful, sympathetic portrayals. Arcadia (2012) by Lauren Groff also portrays a childhood in a commune, this time in upstate New York in the 1970s. The commune is seen through the eyes of Bit, whom we meet as a young child and follow through to adulthood. So powerful is the mythology that has been created around the land and its inhabitants that Bit’s memories of it are not even truly his – we are told in the prologue that a mental image of the women in the river, singing, actually happened before he was born. “The memory clings to him,” Groff writes, “told by Arcadia until it became communal, told again and again until the story grew inside him to become Bit’s own.”

Bit flounders after the commune breaks up, but he doesn’t blame his parents. In an affecting scene, his mother Hannah asks for forgiveness on her deathbed but he says there is nothing to forgive. He remains not only loyal to them, but to their collective dreams and memories:

Bit feels it start to swell in him. The love, which he had turned from, breathes, blinks, swallows. A creature, stirred back to life. He can’t be separate. It is impossible. He is part of the whole.

Similarly, in Maxine Swann’s Flower Children (2007), which tells the story of four siblings raised by hippy parents in Pennsylvania, nostalgia weighs heavily on the adult children:

They feel a great tenderness for certain things. That was where the goats gathered. That was where the cider press still stands, unused for years. Suddenly they feel enraged. How could things go unused like that for years? They should move back here, settle in, make it all work again.

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When an author removes a parent-child relationship from its conventional surrounding structures – the nuclear family, full-time employment, consumerism – that relationship is laid bare, in some narratives revealing trauma and neglect but in others a raw, unmediated love unhampered by establishment forces. As Swann writes: “Why replicate this world that has gone? Because it was so perfect? But it was not. But it was.”

• The Tyranny of Lost Things is published by Sandstone. This article was amended on 22 June 2018 to include the correct name of the author of Hideous Kinky. It is Esther Freud, not Emma.