Being Hip to Parenthood : The father of Rolling Stone magazine--and three boys--introduces Family Life, for parents who are determined not to lose their cool.

Remember the Woodstock Era? Remember the folks who dropped acid, painted their faces and groped naked in the mud while Crosby, Stills & Nash sang, “Teach your children well?”

Well, they and their younger siblings have finally grown up.

They’ve had kids.

And now they must ask themselves a tough question: Is “hip parent” synonymous with “embarrassing dork” or merely an oxymoron?

As if to disprove the conventional wisdom that parents are by definition uncool, Jann Wenner, the father of Rolling Stone magazine and 8-, 6-, and 3-year-old boys, has just launched a new family publication. It will, Wenner says, dish up “the Rolling-Stone sensibility for the Rolling-Stone generation.”

Family Life cannonballs today into a pool already swimming with baby and children’s magazines--about 70 regional parenting publications, including L. A. Parent, and a rapidly proliferating field of national titles, from Family Circle to Parents, Parenting and Family Fun. Family Adventures couldn’t stay afloat and just ceased publication.

But Family Life, says editor-in-chief Nancy Evans, has staked out a sophisticated corner that similar publications ignore.

“Just because people become parents,” she says, “doesn’t mean they lose their brains, lose their sense of humor, lose everything they learned in school.”

Evans, who comes from a solid editing and writing career, left her position as president and publisher of Doubleday in 1990 to spend more time with her young daughter and work on her brainchild: a family magazine that doesn’t treat Mom and Dad like babies.

She has other distinctions of tone and voice in mind for the $2.50, Rolling Stone-size, perfect-bound publication, which Wenner’s Straight Arrow Publishing Inc. is giving an initial run of 300,000 copies.

The magazine, planned as a bimonthly, takes a casually multiethnic world view that includes a fairly even gender mix in the faces represented and the writing. It even offers an essay on finding children’s books that feature decent dads.

“I wanted a magazine men would feel comfortable reading,” Evans says. “I still don’t think men are going to rush to the newsstand to buy it or that they’ll write out the check to subscribe. But once it’s in the house they won’t be embarrassed to read it.”

In her editor’s note, Evans says she would like the magazine to be “the national kitchen table where we can talk about everything from how to entertain the kids at the next birthday party to how to make our schools better.” Ann Pleshette Murphy, editor-in-chief of Parents magazine, is skeptical: “I don’t feel this is a kitchen table . . . it’s more like a bulletin board.”

Murphy says Family Life is making a mistake similar to one another rival made at its inception. Parenting magazine, she says, “was predominantly essays by extremely hip parents, and not much service.”

That changed, Murphy says, when the editors came to a realization: “You can be the hippest guy around . . . a Hampshire College graduate, a rock musician making $300,000 a year or you can be a polyester-leisure-suit guy who’s right of Attila the Hun, and when your kid is screaming at 3 in the morning, you’re in the same boat.”

Wenner says Family Life’s targeted readers, people with children ages 3 to 12, have little patience for publications that dwell on parental anxieties: “We presume they’re already comfortable being parents--they’re not concerned about . . . ‘how to tell if the baby-sitter is a serial killer.’ There’s none of that dumb, looking down at the reader; none of that information-free pablum. It’s the goods. It’s the stuff.”

Some goods in the premiere issue are standard kid and parent ‘zine stuff--a back-to-school guide, health advice, investing for college--done with the snazzy graphics and reportorial flair that at least one breed of baby boomer has come to expect.

But Family Life distinguishes its credentials in cool with content, not with chirpy pop references, as is too often today’s custom.

For example, in discussing “dyssemia”--a panoply of mild behavioral aberrations that can get kids labeled “spaz” or “loser”--Melissa Fay Greene’s “The Left-Out Child” doesn’t stray far from the parenting magazine mode.

But Parent or Family Circle or Child just wouldn’t quote gay author Paul Monette on his youthful pain at being an outcast so offhandedly. Article themes aside, deeper issues are bound to be stirred when a once-controversial cultural icon such as Rolling Stone offers to raise the nation’s children. You know times are a changin’ when it’s possible to envision Bill and Hillary reading this magazine with Chelsea, while toe tappin’ to old Fleetwood Mac tunes. But that vision may make some Americans pause to consider once again the matter the presidential candidates left largely to Murphy Brown and Dan Quayle.

In fact, Family Life is most interesting for this unspoken debate that permeates its pages--for its serious grappling with the meaning of family values for a generation of Rolling Stone rebels-turned-caretakers.

That such soul-searching is afoot is evidenced most clearly by Family Life’s puff profile of Tipper (“label those obscene lyrics”) Gore--the same second lady Rolling Stone has consistently vilified as Goody Two-Shoes on a McCarthyite free-speech purge.

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Jacqueline Leo, editor-in-chief of the 5.2-million circulation Family Circle, believes she understands the impulses at work.

“One of the things that’s true of any parent is, as soon as you become one you’re shocked by your sudden sense of conservatism--you see everything through the eyes of your child.”

Exploring this dilemma, one Family Life reviewer writes: “When it comes to video games, parents of the 1990s are in the same position as their counterparts in the 1970s, who blithely assumed their kids were grooving to the Beatles when, in fact, the little tykes were out pricing the first Black Sabbath album.”

So the reviewer takes a moderate stance, endorsing “Wonder Boy in Monster World,” but dismissing “Splatterhouse 3.”

Likewise, Peter Travis, who writes savvy and unflinching film reviews for Rolling Stone, sounds almost schoolmarmish in his kid movie and video critiques for the new magazine, assailing the merchandising of “Jurassic Park” and labeling Disney’s live-action films “gruesome.”

At least some readers will likely find that view totally bitchin’. Only the dippiest hippie parent, after all, fails to learn quickly that, in child rearing, a double standard is more often common sense than hypocrisy.

Only once does a review swerve from Family Life’s surprisingly tough stance against the increasingly pervasive culture of kiddie crass--and that defense of the flatulent “Ren & Stimpy” (arguably fine for adolescents) comes off stunningly lame: “The network is quick to point out that they’d rather make jokes with buns than guns.”

It can be argued, however, that beyond failing to protect its children from fart jokes, Family Life neglects them on a more fundamental level.

Judging from the magazine’s ads, Family Life readers have not just graduated from VW bugs to station wagons--they’ve graduated to BMW station wagons. They drink Evian, wear trendy parfum and dress their kids in high-end chic.

These advertisers leak shamefully into the editorial content: Clothes maker DKNY runs an ad--it appears in a fashion spread; “The Secret Garden” is advertised full page--across the fold it’s reviewed. It goes on and on.

This conspicuous consumerism, says Jake Winebaum, whose Disney-backed Family Fun boasts an unaudited circulation of 600,000, is what defines his latest rival.

Winebaum, who admits to having been half of a stereotypical “highly consumptive childless couple” in the ‘80s, says, “Early boomers were driven to two careers and their attitude toward parenting was buying stuff for their kids, be it toys, tutors, nannies, whatever. They didn’t really take the time or have the time to be with them . . .

“That all got flushed. (But) Family Life is still being written for a parent in the ‘80s. It doesn’t reflect the spirit of the ‘90s, which is kids first . . . you’ve gotta give up stuff because this is the most important thing you’ll ever do.

“I think Jann Wenner said, ‘Hey, Billy Joel’s having a baby; all my friends are having babies, they must be important!’ ”

But Wenner, in loading his magazine with spreads on $90 soccer gloves and $150 boots, is avoiding the obvious, says Winebaum: “The only way to show your kid you care is to spend time with your kid.”

Evans says she can’t imagine who can afford those BMW wagons.

And to focus on the magazine’s consumer side is to miss its heart, she believes.

Family Life, she says, “is not just about teaching your children, it’s about learning about yourself again. . . . I think there’s a real passionate feeling (that) kids make us better. The community-service revival is going on in part because we have children.”

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Evan’s “we’re all in this together” motto is indeed reflected in the features.

In a fine profile of a crackerjack public school within Chicago’s crack-ridden Robert Taylor public housing projects, Frank James writes: “From downtown Chicago to 52nd and State streets, is a 15-minute journey from America’s pride to its shame.”

In “The Commitment to Doing Good,” psychiatrist Robert Coles details his long conversations with Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter, in which they discussed the familial and psychological underpinnings of altruistic behavior. Today’s parents are who they are because of their parents. And parents do screw up and traumatize their kids, he says. But, he adds, “sensible and honorable times with our children also can have a long legacy.”

Such optimism--at a time when plenty of social theorists, pop-cult gurus and the magazines that love them pretend the typical American family is a drunken, incestuous, abusive, neurotic dysfunctional mess--just may justify Wenner’s contention that his new magazine will be as “revolutionary” as the original Rolling Stone.

Says Family Circle’s Leo, whose blended family includes a 10-year-old daughter and two 20-something stepchildren: “I think the real story is Jann, who’s really into his kids.”

Magazine publishing, she says, is “an intimate experience. . . . If you’re affected by something and have the means to get your views through, that’s good.”

Younger publishers like Wenner and Winebaum, she says, find themselves deeply affected by their children and feel compelled to “act on their instincts. It brings (publishing) back to the core of what it ought to be--rather than just a fourth-quarter business.

“We have a tremendous responsibility. Anything now that goes to the notion of cohesion and family is very good.”

She’s right.

Reading Family Life, one can almost hear the generational gears shifting. The “hope I die before I get old” crowd is now haunted by “Tears in Heaven,” Eric Clapton’s ode to his dead son.

Many are making late-night trips into their kids’ room to look hard at the faces of the generation to come.

They’re trying to figure out how to avoid the mistakes of the earlier group of rock ‘n’ roll parents Rolling Stone helped raise--the ones responsible for the young men the current issue of that magazine declares the voice of their generation: MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head.

Huh-huh. Huh-huh.