Judge Roberts's family secret

IT COULD be the most revealing clue we've seen so far about Supreme Court nominee John Roberts -- one much more ominous than any possible past association with the Federalist Society.

In introducing Roberts last month, President Bush mentioned the judge's wife and children, yet when the cameras panned to the family, his spouse stood alone.

Several networks soon aired troubling footage revealing why. Young Jack, the couple's 4-year-old son, had proved such a pint-sized pinball, ricocheting about so persistently as the president spoke, that his mother finally felt compelled to remove the kids from public view.

Now, daughter Josie, 5, was perfectly behaved, and Mrs. Roberts eventually did corral Jack, so there are evidentiary crosscurrents at play here. Still, the incident constitutes at least prima facie evidence that the Robertses could be members of a philosophical sect whose fusion of liberal and laissez-faire tenets should strike fear into the hearts of all reasonable Americans.

They might just be Doting Indulgent Modern Parents (DIMPIES).

There, alas, they would hardly be out of the American mainstream. On behalf of a dwindling contingent of (barely) sane adults, this space has occasionally lamented that US children too often behave like legions of little Grendels intent on visiting chaos upon the meadhall that is America.

Of course, long research into the annals of atrociousness reveals that bratty children aren't just a contemporary American scourge. Let's turn to chapter three of Stendhal's autobiographical ''The Life of Henri Brulard," in which the author recalls his childhood in late 18th-century France.

''My earliest memory is that of biting in the cheek or on the forehead Mme. Pison-Dugalland, my cousin. . . . I see her still, a woman of 25, plump, and very much rouged. It was apparently this rouge at which I took offense. As she sat in the middle of the meadow . . . her cheek was exactly on a level with my face.

'' 'Kiss me, Henri,' she said to me. I did not want to; she was annoyed, and I bit her hard. I can see the whole scene, no doubt because I was at once reproached with it as if it had been a crime, and because my family never stopped talking to me about it."

So ''exuberant" children, as the ingenious DIMPIE euphemism has rebranded the little terrors, are not entirely new. Yet keen observers of modern parenting will recognize that had that unfortunate encounter occurred today, the family of petit Henri would handle it rather differently.

Certainly there would be neither stern reproach nor equation to crime.

''Now, Henri," a parent would remonstrate, ''did you really mean to bite your cousin so hard that a tourniquet may be needed to stop the blood spurting from her face? Was that really nice?"

If Henri, sensing in the tone of the question that a sail of ever-so-slight censure had appeared on the distant horizon, chose that moment to pitch a precautionary fit? Well, poor Mme. Pison-Dugalland would be left to her own devices -- and whatever Red Cross training she might have -- while Henri was carried to the quiet of the porch, there perhaps to enjoy a sugar cone as a reward for listening to a gentle explanation of why sinking his incisors into a relative was less than exemplary behavior. And to consider, sulkily, a parental supplication that he make things right by offering, at the lowest decibel level the human ear can detect, an apology of sorts.

Such are the conventions of DIMPIE parenting, whose no-penalties approach to misbehavior one correspondent neatly sums up this way: ''Stop that -- or I'll say stop that again."

So in the interest of figuring out whether Judge Roberts subscribes to that pernicious parenting philosophy, here are some broad questions senators might put to him.

In his view as parent and jurist, does the First Amendment give children an untrammeled right to squall at the top of their lungs in public?

If so, does it also hold that there is a constitutional right to cry in a crowded theater?

Does he believe that the Constitution forbids restaurant hostesses from profiling families for evidence of DIMPIE-dom -- and if such evidence is apparent, seating them in a separate (and, one hopes, sound-proof) section of the establishment?

And, finally, does he consider it cruel and unusual punishment to attach an actual consequence to repeated instances of bad behavior?

The non-DIMPIES among us eagerly await his answers.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.