It’s great to see the Strand Theatre in Rockland reborn and hosting such provocative events. “Surfwise,” a documentary of the Paskowitz family – two dropout adults and their nine children raised in the ’60s and ’70s in a camping van – is a good example of such better-than-average theater fare.

I found the movie very helpful, along with the Strand’s discussions before and after the film, in clarifying two issues: how did the underlying principles of the ’60s work out in the long run, and what is the family legacy of a dynamic and strong-willed parent?

You might say that the purpose of a good documentary is to move the viewer, with as little bias as possible, across space and time to the event portrayed. The viewer can then bring the event forward into present time without the director’s judgments.

So this film begins with the 80-year-old Doc Paskowitz restating the truths so many of us swallowed whole in that amazing era: Society is basically bad. Money is bad. Animal behavior is good and to be imitated. Uninhibited sex is transformative. Dropping out is the solution.

Then we moviegoers fastened our seat belts and watched those ideas playing out in the lives of this well-known surfing family.

To talk about parenting, you need a basic job description, so here’s mine: Good parenting is twofold – giving children strong, loving roots, and preparing them to find their own unique wings.

Frankly, as much as we might be passionate about extreme sports, espouse a bratty version of personal freedom, hold our noses and run from mindless bureaucracy, nevertheless Doc’s choices, as parenting, were disasters.

Underneath the puppylike apparent intimacy of those 11 people in a tiny living space, tension, competition and abuse gradually increased as the children aged into their natural assertiveness. What may have worked briefly in the first years turned sour as each child, deprived of outside education, deprived of any geographical stability, found the father’s lockdown stultifying.

If you’re raising gorillas, perhaps, you only need to show how to find bananas and beat up other gorillas. But frankly, raising today’s humans is much more challenging and complex. Anyone who has had a strong parent knows of the years, decades and even generations it takes to heal the wounds of an autocratic and self-obsessed parent.

This film briefly followed each of the nine children as they struggled to separate, using their limited skills and education, from such a domineering family of origin.

Some of the children made use of their two strong family skills: surfing and music. The depth and pain of their enmeshment with their father became most graphic in the song one son had written. In the movie, he sings with wishful longing for the father’s death, and the liberation it would bring. The song built in intensity, as the camera moved ever closer to the son’s angry, sweaty face. No, this was not good parenting.

Many of us who lived full-tilt through the ’60s are left with a love-hate memory. I think probably most of us are grateful for that experience. My own father often asked my mother – I hope his tongue was in his cheek – where they failed in raising me. And my mother would gently remind him of that tidal wave of unrest that landed so squarely on only one of his six children.

A touch of grandiosity certainly distorts our memory of the ’60s. We think of ourselves as great heroes of individuality when we were often sliding into an easy nonconformist conformity. Were we really great idealists, freethinkers and free-speech advocates, when we were working hard not to be cannon fodder in a senseless war? Were we admirable ascetics when we were under-girded by the high water mark of American prosperity?

Yet the ’60s are still history at very close range. Perhaps pivotal historic events were always self-serving under the classy veneer. Perhaps the French Revolution was just a hippie romp at just the right time.

“Surfwise” is also an interesting retrospective on the sexism and male privilege of earlier eras, among which the ’60s were in no way exceptional. Father Paskowitz weeded through two marriages until he found a Mexican-American he could keep pregnant and barefoot. He wanted, and mainly got, male children. He kept his children ignorant and rootless. The half-true passwords of the era lent themselves to a self-indulgent patriarchy. All this allowed him a control trip of unusual completeness, until the time bombs of his children’s independence began to explode, leaving him more and more isolated in his old age.

And so I feel grateful to this film for moving my own process a little further along. Those years were a watershed in my own life.

Everything since has been very slightly ajar. Having an opinionated, heavy-handed father left me with more lost years than I might have wished. But in Buddhism, we often say, “A good situation is a bad situation; a bad situation is a good situation.” And both these challenges have given life an edge I’m not sure I would willingly trade.

Jory Squibb is a handyman, ice-boating enthusiast and recovering hippie who lives in Camden.