"Yes, I like how all Gen X and younger journalists make sure to play along with the fiction that we all somehow had a 1950s childhood rather than one with stuff like Marlo Thomas’ Free To Be You And Me. People should check out the YouTube clips from that 1974 production. That thing must have been seen by anyone who went to elementary school in North America from 1974 until who knows when. Even so, we all have to pretend it’s been “Father Knows Best” until last year some time."

I took that stuff with my mother’s milk as a child. Today, I recognize it as the most irresponsible, harmful message that children were taught at the time.
No, you can’t be and do whatever you want. It was a cruel lie, made all the worse by the crackdown in the 90s, which was demanded and implemented by the very people who concocted “Free To Be” in the first place.
What a double-cross. I still have to deal with people in my generation – middle-aged now – who have been irreparably damaged by this philosophy and still won’t give it up. Frankly I’ve given up hope on them and prefer working with millennials, who are open to the idea that their boomer parents were full of it, and in fact seem to grasp that fact intuitively.