A Couple For Their Times -- The Mystery And Wonder Of The Schoo Family

EVERY holiday season has its Scrooge, and this year was no different. David and Sharon Schoo, the suburban Chicago couple who spent Christmas in Acapulco - leaving their two daughters, ages 9 and 4, to fend for themselves at home - are suffering, for the moment, some well-deserved opprobrium.

First, they were arrested as their plane landed in Chicago. According to the detective who locked them into handcuffs, "They didn't have a clue" why they were being taken into custody.

Now they are subject to psychoanalysis. Their neighbors have revealed that the couple was reclusive. (The lack of sociability is a primal American sin.) "We always thought they were peculiar," says the neighbor across the street. Mr. Schoo was famous for mowing the grass after sundown; Mrs. Schoo would call the police to keep local children out of their pond. Watch your step, eccentrics: Today's endearing quirk could be tomorrow's revealing habit.

In the meantime, Mrs. Schoo's father has suggested that his daughter and her husband need professional care. They need something, all right. When Sharon Schoo and her first husband were divorced, they split the difference by giving up their 4-year-old son for adoption. This was not the first time David and Sharon Schoo had abandoned their children while vacationing in style. And on this trip, as on others, they failed to leave a number where their frightened children could reach them.

In this, as in similar outrages, the anger of the public is likely to flag. No doubt the Schoos will be subject to legal sanction: They may serve time in jail, may lose custody of their daughters - which, from their singular viewpoint, may be a welcome form of punishment. I fully expect to see them on television sometime: Sitting on a dais, parrying thoughtful questions, remembering two childhoods of emotional deprivation. And since few are accountable for their actions in our culture, the Schoos will reliably blame outside causes. In the meantime, however, the public is indignant.

Yet it is difficult, in a sense, to comprehend why. The Schoos, it seems to me, are merely an extreme form of common polite behavior. This is the same society that has raised abortion to the level of civic sacrament. On a constitutional level, I am pro-choice myself; but more than a few of abortion's defenders are uncomfortably ardent for the murder of an infant, or uncommonly dismissive of a "mass of fetal tissue."

Similarly, on the matter of abandonment, the Schoos are truly guilty of irresponsible scheduling. Their observant neighbors, after all, have noted that Mrs. Schoo was "overprotective" of her children, hovering more than necessary, keeping the world at bay. By leaving their daughters for nine days at a time, David and Sharon Schoo left them vulnerable to harm. But in a numerical sense, what is the difference, except in degree, between nine days as a block, and nine working days spread over one month of day care?

There is no more chilling conversation than listening to affluent parents report that modern life requires them to deposit their offspring - at four months, nine months, 1 year or 3 - in a room away from home, with innumerable strange children, a box or two of toys and one paid attendant. Whether it is the weekend place, the father's BMW, a time-share condo or the mother's legal partnership, the reasons for such actions seem dubious at best.

And the Schoos, alas, are more typical than not. Mrs. Schoo is not a single mother, struggling to endure, and Mr. Schoo has weathered the recession rather well. Nor are they contending with an unexpected burden. The presumption that parents deserve it all at once - early affluence, healthy children, dual paychecks, fine dinners - has slowly been translated to a fundamental right.

It is nothing of the sort. Parenthood is a privilege, and a struggle. The rewards may be great, but the costs can be high - not least in sublimation of dreams and desires. And instant gratification takes many different forms: In renouncing infants to custodial care, in forsaking small children for fun in the sun.

The irony, of course, is the slow movement backward. The abandonment of children is nothing new to history; any reader of Dickens would recognize the Schoos. But the boomer generation coming into its own - smart, emancipated, pampered, idealistic - has confused its intelligence with judgment and sense. People who should know better know nothing at all, and shake their heads reading about David and Sharon Schoo.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)