We better find out brand that straight-A student is smoking. Seriously, is she "sleeping with her dealer," or is she toking with her boyfriend? And if she can handle sex and drugs and get straight As, um, what's the problem? It sounds like she's ready for college. I guess Ruth's point is that parents don't want their kids to grow up. Yeah, I buy that, though I confess I don't worry that there aren't enough 16-year-olds with drivers' licenses.

uh oh, my two boys are three and five so I am one year closer to nervous breakdown time. I am with Huck, I was a maniac at 16 when I drove, it is a wonder I didn't die or kill someone else. And spending time at home watching DVD's is normal, not everyone has a date on saturday night. I know I didn't.

As to my own sons, I am going to send them to China to live with their grandparents when they are teenagers. In China in many ways it is still the 1950's, especially in the countryside. And considering how much we are going to owe China by then, their brushing up on their Wu and Mandarin should be helpful.

i think the driver's license thing has more to do with gas being hella expensive than some kind of parental achievement or failing.  Not to mention that licenses for teens are usually so restricted that they are completely useless.  If your going to have to break the law to get where you need to go with the people you need to bring, why go through the hassle to get a license at all?

My oldest is almost 13, so I am starting to deal with puberty and socialization (my other two are 8 and 3).  Before people freak out too much, the should realize that the challenges today aren't that much different than we were young.  When I was out of the house, my parent didn't have any real clue where I was.  I can call my son on his phone, but what he tells me is no guarantee of the truth.  And maybe he can talk to people online - though my son does not seemed to be inclined - but he will be able to talk to people that I don't know about when he leaves the house.  The same lessons still have to be taught to kids, and parents still have to be parents.

There were no personal computers when I was a kid, and even vhs was a few years from being invented. We couldn't get into non-stadium music shows because we were underage, so a lot of us [but not me!] got package liquor with a fake i.d. and drove around. Kids today just don't know how to make their own fun.

These types of lifestyle articles are only illuminating if you're curious about what's being discussed this week in the social circle of a writer for the New York Times.

"Or are they peddling sex via webcam as their parents bask in obliviousness?"  Some do that, others pay homeless people to buy alcohol, others feign illness to get cannabis club cards, others get fake ids, the vast majority of teenage guys have been watching porn for years.  I guess there's less drinking and driving, although lots of people hotbox cars.  This really is hilarious - yall underestimate our resourcefulness so much! Texting under the blanket? kid's probably trying to buy weed.  The thing about valuing family time more is probably true of our generation, I would say the main difference though is that we just find it easier to lie to adults about what were up to rather than fight them about it.  Maybe those video games have made us lazier, but I think its more that facebook has turned us all into PR machines the likes of which the world has never seen (campaign spin in 20 years is going to be absurd by the way).  Perhaps growing up in the bay is different than the rest of the country, but I don't think it's that different.  Anonevent - I think you've got the general idea.

My mentor as an undergrad was chariman of the history department, a dedicated teacher and student of time, he was close to retirement.  We were shooting the breeze in his office, and I made the offhand remark, that a big perk of being a teacher is that being surrounded by youth all the time keeps one young.  His eyes lit up. "Yes!" he exclaimed.

We've lost our faith.  Despite what we may profess, even to ourselves, we know, or we fear, that this is it, that there's no hereafter, no higher state for which life is the prelude.  Thus confronted, we flee.  Where?  Back to the timeles bliss of the womb.  

Well, not so Freudian, but we flee our annihilation, which of course means fleeing in the direction opposite.  We turn to take comfort from the sight of what's behind us, not only the past of own lives, but the present of the young.  But we go further than that, not only looking at them wistfully but trying to live through them.  It's what explains this phenomenon:  http://jmr.org/nyrkr53.jpg

The need to flee from adulthood, to jump off the train hurtling towards the precipice -- the fear -- is also why parents, as adults, seek the company of and are jealous of the time of their offspring.  The longer parents can be a part of their child's life, the longer they can remian children themselves, the longer they can put off the inevitable.  The computer spying, voyeurism masked with indignation, is one example, the flight to California, which does not believe in death, is another.

The infantization of adults is an existential problem, perhaps inevitable in the developed world, where leisure time affords the chance to ponder mortality, and wealth and technology allow us to flee from it, if only in our minds.  Before we lost our faith, life was a vale of tears from which we were content to depart.  Now that life is sweet and all there is, it's no longer life we're content to depart from, it's life we're trying desperately to cling to.

By the way, I'm all for it.

anonevent and maxblum13, great points.  Kids haven't changed that much.  What's interesting is the change in the nature of adulthood we've seen in only a few generations.