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For works dating from The '90s onward, The '60s and The '70s are now far back enough that a lot of the people who were living the hippie lifestyle have become parents and grandparents, so you can bet that they show up a lot in fiction.

They are pretty easy to spot: they usually live in a house with cringy orange and brown decor ripped from the 1970s even though they live in the early 2000s, enjoy cannabis and LSD, use alternative medicine, especially if it's Eastern, and do yoga or chanting. They wear seventies clothes like tye-dyed shirts and sport '70s Hair and beads, and sandals (or go barefoot), and they say things like 'groovy'. They name their kids embarrassing things like 'Flower' or 'Rainbow', if not pop culture names like 'Galadriel' and 'Spock'. Expect someone to ask Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?. Vehicles of choice are a 1970s VW bus or a van with far-out psychedelic murals.

They often double as Amazingly Embarrassing Parents, and engage in Hands-Off Parenting; may sometimes be Teasing Parents as well. May or may not have once lived in a Hippie Commune, but they probably have some crazy stories about LSD that are bound to scar their children for life, or, in a positive sense, hazy recollections about seeing Hendrix or Dylan back in the day.

Compare Hippie Teacher. A subtrope of New-Age Retro Hippie and Bourgeois Bohemian. Contrast The Vietnam Vet Father, who usually grew up in a similar time period but went completely the other way about it.


Examples:

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    Advertising 
  • This 2014 Suburu commercial features a Hippie Grandmother talking to her granddaughter about the late 60s and even shown her the tree where she met the girl's grandfather (or was it that tree?) where the Woodstock music festival was.

    Comic Books 
  • Archie once had a kid who dressed in a very businesslike style, apparently as teenage rebellion against hippie parents.
  • In Ultimate Spider-Man, Uncle Ben has been shown as a hippie.
  • Possible Ur-Example: A 1960s MAD feature had hipster/greaser parents trying to deal with their straight-laced children. However, their grandkids are exactly like them.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 9 has Billy's grandmother.
  • Carrie's heard-but-never-seen parents in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns are hippies, stoners, and generally irresponsible. ("Hey, don't we have a kid?") It's implied that a desire for structure is the reason she runs off to become Robin.
  • Gender Queer: A Memoir: Both Maia's parents are basically this, into alternative education, easily flouting conventional gender roles and highly accepting of their kids' personalities, whatever they are.

    Fan Works 
  • Terra from Convergent Paths, while being a really good and caring mother, still has moments of this, such as coloring her gym in "Mother Earth" theme, almost never wearing shoes and her love for meditating, up to the point of switching between normal state and meditative state (in which she speaks "like a wise elder of a village").
  • In Captainkodak1's fanfic Aftermath of Camp WannaWeep, Tara's parents appear to be this. Their house is decorated with '60s and '70s stuff, and they're understanding and bit more laidback. Tara's father doesn't approve of violence, but accepts Ron's decision to use the Lotus Blade when he has no other choice.
  • One "Emergency!'' fic has Craig Brice, of all characters, with these. "Harmony and Sunshine". A little less jarring since it was set in the 70s, but Brice is still the last character you'd expect to have them.
  • The Daria fanfic "God Save the Esteem" is a play on this trope. It was a response to a challenge about giving the show a Setting Update; the author suggested that in that case, Jake and Helen wouldn't have been hippies in their youth, but punks, the next big counter-cultural movement. Then he began to wonder what would happen if they never stopped being punks...

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Jamie's mother in Friends with Benefits.
  • The elder Fockers of Meet the Fockers are very hippie.
  • Carter from In Good Company had hippie parents and felt deprived as a child, leading him to become what was, essentially, a Straw Capitalist.
  • In Joe Wright's Hanna the family she befriends has hippie parents.
  • Rhiannon's parents in Easy A were hippies. The reason the whole plot gets set into motion is because Olive, Rhiannon's best friend, is uncomfortable around them and declined a weekend camping with them.
  • In the Dennis Hopper/Kiefer Sutherland vehicle, Flashback, it is revealed that hippie-hating FBI agent John Buckner (Sutherland) was reared by extremely hippie parents on a commune.
  • Alvin from Alvin and the Chipmunks explains to Dave that their parents were hippies so they abandoned them to join a commune.
  • Harold Ramis's character in Knocked Up is Seth Rogen's father and an apparent older hippy. He seems to have a permissive attitude toward his son, and his advice on drugs is "anything that comes from the earth is probably okay." He's even excited to become a grandfather even though the child was from an accidental drunken one night stand that his son had with a woman he'd never met until that night.
  • From the movie Valley Girl, Julie's parents are hippies who own their own health food cafe. She's slightly embarrassed by that and openly pines "Why couldn't they own a Pizza Hut or something?"
  • In the film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Luna Lovegood's father Xenophilius has this aesthetic in his brief time on-screen.
  • In Repo Man, Otto's parents are shown to be stoner hippies who constantly watch TV, never leaving the couch to the point of having actual cobwebs. They give Otto's college fund to a Christian TV cult.
  • Wild Thing: As a young child in The '60s, Wild Thing lived with his parents, a man dressed like Jesus and a woman with long, braided hair, in a painted van decorated with peace symbols.

    Literature 
  • Pepper's mother in Good Omens was going through a (thankfully short-lived) hippie phase when her daughter was born, hence Pepper's real name being Pippin Galadriel Moonchild. While Pepper's mother decided she wasn't cut out for living "close to nature" and instead opted to get as far away from nature as possible, she does still dabble in things like "power Tarot readings".
  • There's actually a children's picture book out there, Reeve Lindbergh's My Hippie Grandmother. Books like this, Bill Richardson'snote  I Would Have Gone To Woodstock and Abigail Yasgur's Max Said Yes! keep the spirit alive for little children. There is also Rogerio Almeida Nogueira's fantastic cartoon retelling, Hippie Hooray! which was featured on the VH1 documentary Woodstock Then and Now. This retrospective also showed young children learning to play and sing in the rock and folk styles from that era. And the old crafts are still learnable from books like Hippie Crafts.
  • In Anita Blake, Peter and Becca's mom (Edward/Ted's girlfriend) is a New Age hippy witch-wannabe.
  • In the Keys to the Kingdom series, Leaf and Ed's parents are these. Ed's legal name is 'Branch', just to give you an idea.
  • Thomas "Stoner" Stone from 1632 is a last-generation hippie, and the father of three boys named Faramir, Elrond and Gwaihir.
  • In The Chronicles of Narnia, the parents of Eustace Clarence Scrubb might be considered proto-hippie parents; they're slightly too early to actually be hippies, but they act in some ways consistent with this trope. C. S. Lewis seemed to not be a fan, as Eustace Clarence Scrubb turned out rather badly. It could also be argued that they are proto-yuppies, as they don't seem to have much in the way of humour or sense of aesthetics.
  • In How Not To Be Popular by Jennifer Ziegler, Maggie's parents are hippies who move her around every few months.
  • In Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edgehill's Shadow Grail series, Spirit White's parents are definitely very hippy leaning, if not hippies themselves.
  • In The Baby-Sitters Club, Dawn's best friend (in California), Sunshine Daydream Winslow (Sunny for short), had hippie parents. They no longer are in the present day, though some of their views haven't changed. Also in California, Dawn baby-sits for her neighbors Clover and Daffodil Austin, whose parents used to be "flower children".
  • Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Birds Of Summer is about the two daughters of Oriole, a flighty flower child who wants to be "one with Nature" while leaving most of the responsibility to 16-year-old Summer, including caring for little Sparrow. This is one of Snyder's most realistically grim and even angry books from the mid-70s and like A Fabulous Creature (about a boy's sexual coming of age) is not well thought of today; she was very frank about drug use, teen pregnancy, brutal DEA raids, terrorism, blackmail and other "uncomfortable" issues; the book begins with Oriole losing a successful bakery job for coming to work stoned.
  • Leslie's parents are seen as hippies by the other parents in Bridge to Terabithia. They're wealthy city folk who moved to a rural area in order to get 'back-to-nature'. They even threw out their television, which makes their daughter even more ostracized at school. Leslie's parents are laidback and even encourage her to use their given names. Jess thinks it's weird how Leslie is actually friends with her parents and is unnerved by her using their names. After Leslie's death they end up moving back to the city.
  • In King Dork, Tom's mother and stepfather ("Little-Big Tom") are this, to Tom's annoyance.
  • In the Casson Family Series, Eve Casson tells her daughter Rose that she was a hippy. "'I bet Dad wasn't!' said Rose."
  • In Yellowface, the protagonist's mother had a hippy phase, causing her to name her daughters Juniper Song and Aurora Whispers Hayward.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Rainbow's parents in black•ish. They have an RV that runs on human waste, don't believe in money, and joined a cult at some point in Rainbow's childhood. They also named her Rainbow.
  • Dharma's parents Larry and Abby in Dharma & Greg.
  • On Family Ties Steven and Elyse tried to keep the spirit of the hippie movement alive while still living their upper middle class lifestyle.
  • In jPod, John Doe (nee "crow well mountain juniper") has a lesbian hippie mother who lives on a commune. He is so embarrassed by this that he has spent his adult life attempting to become as statistically average as possible.
  • Garcia of Criminal Minds opened up about her deceased hippie parents in the episode "Penelope". They were killed by a drunk driver when Garcia was 18. After that, Garcia went underground and taught herself code. When she was busted hacking into an FBI database, she had a choice of either going to jail or being recruited by the FBI.
  • In Charmed, the sisters' grandmother was a Granola Girl during her youth, until her husband died and she turned into a remorseless demon-killing machine.
  • Leos and Tabeas Parents are said to have been these in Club der roten Bänder.
  • Sara Sidle on CSI, and there are indications this may be the case with DB too. An Air Force general calls DB out on it, even showing him a black-and-white photo of them in their youth. The same general used top-secret developments to murder his mistress, their child, and a few other people in order to "protect this country" (i.e. cover his ass). Fittingly, he's played by John de Lancie.
  • Herbert Thiel, the cannabis-growing taxi-driver father of Kommissar Frank Thiel of the Münster Tatort is an example of the German variant of this. Frank as a policeman may be a bit more straight-laced, but like his father he has a chip on his shoulder towards the upper classes and he supports FC St. Pauli, a favourite among leftists and alternative types.
  • Played with in ALF: both Willie Tanner and his wife Kate are revealed to have been hippies during the 60's, but unlike most other examples they have grown out of it with the years, and their current life style no longer reveals anything about their past.
  • Karma's parents on Faking It. Her mother has a fortune-teller sister, and they get busted for selling pot brownies out of their kale truck at the school.
  • A lot of the Meyerist elders in The Path are this, especially Hank and Gaby Armstrong, Sarah's parents. The movement started as an experimental commune in the 1970s.
  • Sense8: Amanita Caplan's mother is a self-described "child of the 60s" which makes her very open-minded and accepting of the concept of Sensates. At least part of Amanita's childhood was spent living in a commune just outside San Franciso. There's also the fact that Amanita's name is derived from the amanita muscaria psychadelic mushroom.
  • Grace and Frankie: Frances "Frankie" Bergstein is a hippie parent (whose children are now grown), who still dresses in hippie cloths, practices new age spirituality and partakes in some alternative medicine (though not to the exclusion of mainstream medicine), produces art as hobby, is very sexually liberated, and holds left wing political views.
  • One of the agents in Secrets, a 1993 Australian series about a fictional internal security agency, is the offspring of radical hippy parents. However she speaks bitterly of how they were too stoned to give her much attention, and it's implied her joining an organisation they would have regarded as the enemy is her personal Take That!.

    Music 
  • Sharin Foo of The Raveonettes grew up on a hippie commune in Djursland, Denmark.
  • Eminem's parents were hippies in a rock band when he was conceived. It's downplayed, as his parents' hippie aspects are far from the most notable attributes of them under Eminem's pen, but it eventually results in "Rhyme Or Reason", a 2013 in which Eminem hijacks a sample of The Zombies's "Time Of The Season" for an anthem about Slim's Summer of Hate. Repeatedly in the song he recalls his birth and insults his father — obliquely referencing The Generation Gap between his idealistic Boomer parents enjoying free love in 1972, and the nihilistic fury of Em's year-2000 Millennial audience that related to his abusive music.

    Newspaper Comics 
  • Calvin's parents (or at least his dad) appear to have had a hippy phase in college. In one strip, Calvin comments on things about his dad's college yearbook, while in another Calvin decides that words are arbitrary and can mean whatever he wants them to and his dad answers him in a bunch of hippy slang.
  • InSecurity: Sam's parents still dress the part, are pretty clearly on pot and tend to spend their time fighting whatever they think "the man" is repressing this week.
  • PreTeena, where Hugh and Tess Keene, professional artists raising two daughters, have more than a hint of the laid-back Hippie Parent about them, much to the discomfort of fourteen-year old Jeri.

    Roleplay 
  • In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, Luna's parents used to be pretty deep in the lifestyle- it's how she got her first name, much to her shame. It's mostly in the past now, but sometimes the hippie comes back out to embarrass Luna.

    Theater 
  • The O'Connell-Rosenberg household of Ride the Cyclone is helmed by two extreme hippies who gave their daughter the name "Ocean." Ocean grew up to be a Go-Getter Girl/ Academic Alpha Bitch who thrived in her extremely strict Catholic school and looked to her academic achievements to measure her self worth — nothing like the rest of her family. This gets Lampshaded in Ocean's introduction:
    The Amazing Karnak: Ocean was born into a family of far-left-of-center Humanists, who moved to northern Saskatchewan to live a carbon-free lifestyle. The hemp needlepoint sign above the household's toilet read "If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown scoop it out with your hand and put it in the compost." Yet in between all the drum circles, Marxist parables, and cheese sandwiches made of human breast milk, Ocean could never shake the feeling she was the White Sheep of her family.

    Toys 
  • Post-Summer of Love, many hippies bought rural property, re-learning rural skills on single-family farms, collective farms or Communes. The trope of the "back to the land" country hippie was so influential that it gave birth in 1974 to a set of Mattel dolls called the Sunshine Family and an array of wholesome, back-to-nature playsets. (Much more here and even more here.) Steve, Stephie and baby Sweets had a four-room farmhouse, a truck, a surrey cycle and a craft business with many supplementary kits. The "idea books" taught kids how to do things like raise potatoesnote  and make useful things out of recycled materials. The family were later joined by a cat and dog, a cow and hen, grandparents, a redhead single-mother auntie and her daughter, more babies, and neighbors called the Happy Family — Hal, Hattie and baby Hon — who were the first Afro-American doll friends who weren't just black versions of the main characters).

    Web Comics 
  • Penny and Aggie: the author noted once that Aggie's mom (dead before the beginning of the story) was a hippie long after it was cool.
  • Haruna's parents in Tsunami Channel were hippies, as Japan did have a variation of them. Though she was reared by her traditionalist grandmother.
  • Protagonist Mike Smith's mother Wisteria 'Teri' Smith is one in Mahou Shounen Fight!!. She renamed herself Wisteria when she was six and does things like wake Mike in the middle of the night because the moon is giving off 'radiant love energy' or makes him meals comprised solely of dandelion. Her character points out however she's rather business minded in selling her 'interestingly scented yoga mats' and has quite the desire to crush her competition.
  • Graev's parents in the LGBT slice-of-life comic Bridges are a fairly classic hippie couple. They're also Pagan.
  • Sparrow's mother from But I'm a Cat Person.
  • The parents of Sabrina's boyfriend in Sabrina Online, resulting in him growing up to be an uptight, straight-laced IT person. His dad thinks it's because they named him after Richard Nixon; it's implied he was conceived while they were "celebrating" his resignation.

    Western Animation 
  • Mandy's mother, Phoebe, was this in her debut appearance in Totally Spies!
  • The Simpsons:
    • Ned Flanders' parents, though they are more Beatniks, The '50s version of this trope. They didn't discipline young Ned at all because they didn't want to inhibit his self-expression. His mother describes it as "we've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas." Played straight in a later appearance, where they visit Ned and pester him with their laid-back stoner ways.
    • Homer's mom was also a hippie. (Well, she started out as a political activist opposing biological weapons testing, but she eventually fell under the hippie spell.)
  • Dexter's Laboratory: In the revival seasons, it turns out Mandark's parents (shown above in a fan-comic) are hippies who were so averse to gender norms they named him Susan and had him affect a very androgynous appearance (long hair, pink clothes), as well as discourage Mandark's interest in science. They remain oblivious to how much their son has hated all of this (and them) since the moment he was born.
  • Daria:
    • Jane's family, although that might just be Hands-Off Parenting (for which it used to be the Trope Namer). Jane and Trent are relatively well-adjusted, but their three older siblings are kind of dysfunctional as a result.
    • Flashbacks show that Daria's own parents were hippies; they've since sold out, but sometimes seem wistful about their decision. One episode focuses on their old friends the Yeagers, who are still hippies and have a teenage son of their own now. They're unhappy with their life and begin to "modernize" by the end of the episode.
  • Ben's rarely-seen parents from Ben 10. Although in Ben 10: Alien Force, it's shown Ben's father is a city engineer and seems to be a solidly respectable middle-class type.
  • Steven Universe's father Greg was the Black Sheep of his stuffy, conservative family and ran away to follow his dream of being a musician while legally changing his surname to Universe and living in a van. He's a big proponent of Hands-Off Parenting as he believed in freedom above all else due to having Control Freak parents, which a grown-up Steven clashes with him over as he felt he was denied a normal life.
  • My Dad the Rock Star: Rock's wife is a hippie of the New Age aromatherapy type. His mother is the right age to have been a real hippie, and she's sort of closeted because of her snooty husband.
  • The Tofus stars a pair of such parents, as well as their children, who share little of their interest in the granola lifestyle.
  • In Futurama, there are several generations of hippies in a family, all called Free Waterfall.
  • The Loud House: According to "Vantastic Voyage", Lynn Sr.'s dad, Leonard, had a hippie phase.
  • Vana from Sidekick is frustrated to no end by her Hippie Mom.
  • Mikey's parents from Recess.
  • Nina's parents, Zeph and Fern, in Pixel Pinkie. They wear tie-dyed clothes, are vegetarians, keep chickens in the backyard, and drive a VW Kombi powered by biofuel.
  • Sarah's mother in The Maxx.
  • Peter and Lois temporarily become this in the Family Guy episode "Deep Throats."


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