Jeannine Ouellette [2]It’s another spring evening at the Mall of America, where the Glitz store is in full bloom with taffeta and tulle. Pastel Cinderella dresses glimmer under the fluorescent lights, and the skirts bursting from these sleeveless bodices are so lush, they make the satin wedding gown I wore fourteen years ago seem downright drab. I touch the bejeweled outer layer of a particularly lovely dress, and then I see its $298 price tag, which further confirms the dowdiness of my own once-upon-a-time princess costume (now stored dutifully in a cardboard box in the basement, for posterity).

In any case, I’m not here for a dress, but for the teenagers who buzz around me, circling the racks and ducking in and out of dressing rooms with their selections. I’ve already spent countless hours in legitimate, moderated teen chat rooms, marveling at the banter among twelve- to fifteen-year-old boys and girls. Most recently they’ve been asking each other for advice about whether or not to have sex, what to do if your dad thinks you’re a ’ho, how to get a girl back, combating lust, and whether boys prefer shaved pubic hair on girls. Now I’m hoping to break out of the close, sweaty space of these anonymous chats and talk to some local teens face to face. I see a friendly looking girl at the rack with the jeweled skirt and I make my move.

Melissa, it turns out, is a junior from Lafayette, Minnesota (population 529), and she’s here shopping for the prom. She doesn’t have a date yet, but she plans to go either way, because, as she explains, prom is a very big deal. “I guess girls like to get all dolled up, it makes us feel important,” she told me shyly, averting her gaze. When I asked if she thought there would be drinking and drugs and sex at the prom, she looked a bit wounded. “No, I don’t think we really have that kind of thing,” she said.

Of the fifteen or so kids in my highly unscientific sampling at the mall that night, Melissa, the shy girl sporting a mouthful of braces and little or no make-up on her almost clear skin, was the only one who expressed such reassuring naivete.

If the lilac buds outside my window pop open today, then others were blooming yesterday along roadsides approximately seventeen miles south of here, and still more will be doing so tomorrow seventeen miles northward. Spring rolls along at a pleasantly predictable pace year after year, global warming or no. As it arrives, it greens the lawns, buds the trees, and transforms winter’s faded trash into dirty pinwheels to blow in the wind. Spring also heralds prom night, a cultural relic that UrbanDictionary.com now defines as an “unusual American custom in which otherwise Puritanical just-say-no parents support, tolerate, approve of, or feign ignorance and/or disapproval of teenage public drunkenness, destruction of hotel property, and lewd behavior.”

Today’s proms are not at all the crepe paper-and-punch affairs of times past. As the premiere social events of the teen season and the last hurrah of adolescence, today’s over-the-top, limo- and hotel-enhanced, booze- and sex-soaked proms might even be viewed as emblematic of the way everything about American adolescence has changed. And adolescence has changed, in that it now lasts for all of about twenty minutes—or twenty years, depending on how you look at it. We simultaneously want to accelerate childhood into adulthood, and spend our adulthood resisting the trappings of age and idolizing and emulating youth.

American adolescence is both the shortest and the longest it has ever been at any point in history, which isn’t saying all that much, since the term “teenager” with all its associated connotations was only first coined in 1942—prior to which the notion of an extended passage between childhood and adulthood had yet to be embraced in ideological or practical terms.

Modern adolescence has been defined as lasting until anywhere between age nineteen and thirty-four (the latter being the age of adulthood, as pinpointed by the $3.4 million “Transitions to Adulthood” project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation). Known as the Peter Pan syndrome, the trend of extended adolescence is represented by a growing number of twenty-somethings who depend on their parents well past the point of legal adulthood. According to the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, the number of young adults in their twenties living at home with their parents increased by fifty percent between 1970 and 1990. Today, sixty-three percent of college students say they plan to live with their parents after graduation.

Meanwhile, when does adolescence start? Scientists have noticed that this physiological phase begins as much as a year earlier with each passing generation. And younger adolescents’ exposure to sex, drugs, alcohol, and independence from parental authority is becoming more widespread and intense. Increasingly younger children are taking up the outer vestments of teendom. Meanwhile, the physical signs of puberty are also creeping down to affect eight-, seven-, even six-year-old girls (and the newest research suggests the age of puberty is also falling for boys). A century ago, the average age for a girl’s first period, or menarche, was about seventeen. Menarche now hits girls between twelve and thirteen. Alcohol, drugs, and sex are now typical, rather than exceptional, components of modern adolescence. Social research also shows the most influential forces in the lives of many teens shifting from family to peer culture, including the media, at younger and younger ages. This is not restricted to urban settings. Suburban high school students have sex, drink, smoke, use illegal drugs, and engage in delinquent behavior as often as urban public high school kids. This is according to senior researchers at the Manhattan Institute, who drew their findings from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health—one of the most comprehensive and rigorous studies of American high school students. Regardless of where they live, students also engage in these behaviors much more often than most people realize.

The American press is saturated with stories about the “crisis of adolescence,” with new headlines literally every day. And then, every so often, someone cries foul, protesting all the fuss: “Shut up, already. They’re teenagers! Teenagers have always been reckless and there never were any good old days, so get over it!”

It’s an appealing sentiment, in a way. If we accept it at face value, we can let out a guilty little sigh and go back to business as usual, convinced that things are not, after all, so bad out there—and certainly not so much worse then when we were kids. This denial ought to hold up for as long as it takes to read the facts from a recent slew of news stories: The U.S. has the highest rates of teen pregnancy and births (and abortions) in the western industrialized world. Half of all fourteen-year-olds have been to a party with alcohol. Self-harm (cutting) is increasing among children as young as six. More than 79,000 teens under eighteen received cosmetic surgery in 2001, and 3,682 of those got fake breasts—up from 392 in 1994. Almost half of fourteen-year-olds report current drinking behavior; about a quarter report heavy drinking and marijuana use. Girls as young as twelve are reporting pressure to have sex. Twenty percent of twelve- to fourteen-year-olds have had sex. The percentage of sexually active eighteen-year-olds has risen steadily from twenty-three percent in 1959 to eighty percent in 1999. Sixty-six percent of all high school seniors have had sex. Half of all young people report experience with oral sex—which they, like Bill Clinton, don’t define as “sex.” American kids spend twenty-eight hours per week watching television. Childhood obesity has hit an all-time high. About three quarters of teens believe that the actions of other teens are influenced by the sexual behavior seen on television. Sixty-five percent of the sexually transmitted diseases diagnosed this year will be among people under twenty-five. A statewide study shows that ten percent of adolescent males in Minnesota have chlamydia. Teens are five times more likely to get herpes today than in 1970, and because most teens think oral sex is safe, record numbers of teens are contracting a strain of mouth herpes that was once associated only with genitals.

The story spins out as far as you can follow it and beyond, and in the end it should force us to wonder if, after all this, the kids are all right.A couple of years ago, when I was teaching second grade, I found myself at parent-teacher conferences reassuring two mothers whose girls were, undeniably, showing signs of puberty. “I don’t understand it,” lamented one. “She wants to know what that ‘onion’ smell under her arms is, and why her breasts are growing when no one else’s are.”

It’s difficult and confusing for little girls in second grade, not to mention first, to be hit with puberty. Eight-year-olds find these changes scary, and even disgusting. They feel set apart from their peers and that makes them angry. Research suggests that early puberty may have negative consequences for girls’ mental health and quality of life. Most of the credible research in this area focuses on early menstruation, not puberty (which arrives much earlier), but at least one study of thirty-three girls from ages six to eleven showed that those who go through puberty before nine are more likely to be depressed, aggressive, socially withdrawn, and to experience sleep problems and obsessive behavior. In a larger study of 1,700 girls in Oregon, those who claimed to have matured earlier than classmates were more likely to drink and smoke, and twice as likely to have experienced substance abuse and disruptive behavior disorders.

This can’t be good news. Although I didn’t fully grasp the extent of the trend back when I was teaching second grade, today’s girls are, across the board, growing up faster and reaching puberty earlier than their mothers did. American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines now state that girls who develop breasts and pubic hair at age six or seven are no longer necessarily abnormal. But while the “normalization of early puberty” may lessen the sharp feelings of separation among girls who experience it, does this mean we should shrug off the shift? Or are we obligated to ask ourselves whether first-graders entering puberty can possibly be a good, normal thing?

The phenomenon of widespread earlier puberty was first highlighted in the scientific community in 1997, when North Carolina physician and researcher Marcia Herman-Giddens published a breakthrough journal article on the subject, based on her study of 17,000 girls across the country. Herman-Giddens’s research showed that by eight years old, forty-eight percent of black girls and fifteen percent of white girls show clear signs of puberty, such as breast buds and pubic hair. In extreme cases, these developments are occurring in girls as young as three.

Herman-Giddens considers early puberty a serious public health issue. “Is it going to keep getting lower? Are kids going to get to be [pubescent at] five and four and three? And is this supposed to be happening? I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s what nature intended,” she told the New York Times Magazine. Since her work was first publicized, the entire scientific community, from endocrinologists to primatologists, has been trying to figure out what’s causing the shift.

There is at least one reason most experts agree on: childhood obesity. Kids are getting too fat, and heavier girls may enter puberty earlier. Percentage of body fat, which rises naturally around the time of puberty, is believed to be one of the triggers for the onset of sexual maturation and eventual ovulation. (This is why underweight girls experience delayed menarche, and serious female athletes cease to menstruate when their overall body fat dips too low.)

But the big picture is probably too complicated to be reduced to a single cause-and-effect explanation. Other, more controversial research suggests potential causal relationships between puberty and such diverse influences as absentee fathers, the presence of stepfathers, stress, milk, chemicals, and TV.

Hypotheses related to divorce and stepfathers can mostly be traced to the work of two researchers, Jay Belsky and Bruce Ellis, who’ve explored a generality called “the absent father theory,” hinged on the notion that the biological processes of puberty can be triggered by exposure to stress, and/or exposure to sex hormones known as pheromones. What’s been shown so far is that girls with more distant family relationships mature earlier, especially if the interactions with their fathers early in life were of poor quality or absent. The presence of an unrelated male in the household, such as a stepfather or mother’s boyfriend (no matter how consistent) may speed development even more. These findings are backed up in nature, where scientists have observed that puberty is inhibited in prairie dogs whose biological fathers are present, while puberty begins in prepubescent mice exposed to the pheromones of unrelated males.

The findings might also suggest that the earlier age of puberty among girls in divorced families is catalyzed by stress, which in turns triggers puberty. Evolutionary psychologists argue that since the survival of a species depends on the ability of its members to pass on their genes, behaviors that facilitate reproduction and survival persist and evolve because the people who employ them produce prolifically. Meanwhile, less effective reproductive strategies disappear because those who employ them produce few offspring. Thus, early menarche may have evolved as a strategy to solve the specific problem of life in a “hostile environment.”

According to the theory, females in dangerous environments (which a modern-day stressful family situation could mimic) gained a reproductive advantage because they were physically able to reproduce earlier. Precocious development of curvaceous hips and breasts make a girl attractive to potential mates at a younger age, increasing her chances of early mating. And the earlier she mates, the better her chances of reproducing before succumbing to the dangers of the environment.

Whatever the reasons, life in divorced or remarried families promotes early maturation. In nondivorced families, only eighteen percent of girls go into menarche at age eleven or younger, while that figure for girls in divorced and remarried families hikes up to twenty-five and thirty-five percent respectively.

And one thing is absolutely clear: A link exists between early maturing and sexual activities. However, that link is influenced by characteristics of the adolescent and the family and by relationships outside the family.

Researchers Belsky and Ellis worried at first about having their work seized upon by “intolerant politicians” out to prove that divorce and cohabitation are biologically destructive, and that the African-American community is affecting the health of its own girls through “socially deviant” behavior. But the backlash has not happened. Rather, this particular body of research has been more or less ignored. “Ours is not a popular theory,” Belsky says. “It is treated like biological determinism, and that gives it a bad name among some people. They think we’re saying biology is destiny here.”

More readily accepted and repeated in the public arena, at least, are the theories about triggers related to diet and environment. Many researchers are questioning whether milk consumption is somehow related to early maturity, either through the milk itself or the variety of hormones conventionally raised dairy cattle are now exposed to. Cow’s milk has a high fat content; high levels of biologically available hormones such as estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone; artificially added hormones and growth factors; and other chemical contaminants from the medications, environmental trash, and recursive feeds they are given. The evidence is compelling enough that Herman-Giddens, for one, has said that her milk-drinking days are over.

Other scientists have been examining the potential risks of chemicals that have become prevalent elsewhere in our environment. There’s some disturbing evidence to suggest that certain plastics may be wreaking havoc in all sorts of ways, causing not just early sexual maturation but other problems, from reproductive cancers to infertility. Dr. John P. Myers, director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation and co-author of Our Stolen Future, has said that experiments have linked early puberty in mice to exposure to bisphenol A—used in polycarbonate plastic, such as food and drink containers—and phthalate esters which are found in cosmetic and beauty products, especially hair and nail products. But the American Plastics Council insists that those claims are unfounded, and that polycarbonate has been rigorously tested by both government and industry researchers for forty years. “Any association between [premature sexual maturation] and exposure from consumer products made of polycarbonate is unfounded,” said the Council. Likewise, the American Chemistry Council refused to take any blame, stating, “There is a considerable body of scientific research that indicates that phthalate esters are not the cause of early puberty.”

While those debates rage on, there’s one more lonely little theory—the least publicized of all but possibly the most intriguing, if only because it is at once so enormous and yet so much within our theoretical control. Some researchers propose that society itself is triggering precocious sexual maturity in our youth through the power of suggestion. They believe it’s worth a long, careful look to see whether the increase in images of sex on television fosters sexual maturity, in much the same way that images of food stimulate salivation. In other words, by surrounding our youth in a culture of soft porn—and make no mistake, children as young as eight comprehend the sexual innuendo and jokes on TV and in movies—we are coaxing them to develop sexually at younger ages. Further, once we’ve shown kids enough repeated images of unbridled sexuality to at least stimulate the desire to imitate adult sexual behaviors (if not trigger the physical process of puberty itself), then we begin to aggressively sell them fashion and accessories that help them to do so.Tina Wells is CEO of Buzz Marketing and managing director of the Blue Fusion advertising agency in Manhattan. Buzz Marketing produces research for Blue Fusion’s clients, through constant communication with network of some 9,000 “spotters” in the field: kids ages seven to twenty-four who are paid to report on what’s hot and what’s not. Buzz is most keyed in on “tweens”: the seven- to twelve-year-old group that “as a market, is really hot and really growing,” Wells told me over the phone, sounding positively electrified. “This is a very sophisticated group with a huge disposable income. These kids are very savvy, very smart, very plugged in. They get their money from their parents, and they don’t have the same expenses older teens do, like cell phones, senior prom, spring break. They’re not only spending their own money, but they’re influencing their parents’ purchases to a huge extent, as well. Eighty-eight percent of tweens are putting something onto the family grocery list.” Yet another survey for the new millennium showed that U.S. kids twelve and under spent nearly $30 billion of their own money and influenced spending of $248.7 billion by their parents. Some thirty-three million teenagers in the U.S. spent about $20 billion on beauty and health products alone in 2002.

Retailers are eager to profit from the fact that kids these days are growing up faster than ever. “In marketing, we have a nickname for it,” said Wells. “We call it KGOY: Kids Growing Older Younger.” The industry also refers to this as “age compression,” the idea being that today’s eight-year-old is being treated like the twelve-year-old of five years ago.

Fashion, in particular, offers a powerful look at the way the trappings of later adolescence and young adulthood have pushed their way into younger age groups. Today, Britney Spears gets credit for championing the trend of hooker fashion for kids, although a generation ago we pointed to Madonna. Regardless of who’s to blame, what’s worth noticing is the change over that generation: While it used to be high school students copying the latest pop star’s racy wardrobe and accessories, today fourth-graders are doing it, and it’s not uncommon to see even younger kids in provocative adult clothes. The marketing of sexy, grown-up looks to seven- to fourteen-year-olds is a growing national trend.

The future of our society is emerging in tween culture, and it’s hard to tell where exactly it’s headed, or what it will ultimately look like. But there’s a good chance it will be wearing a thong. A couple of years ago, Ambercrombie & Fitch got the attention of everyone from Rush Limbaugh to the ladies at NOW when it came out with a line of kiddie thong underwear. The bottomless undies, sized for girls ten to sixteen, were decorated with phrases like “eye candy” and “wink wink.” A&F was inundated with letters and emails from various consumer advocacy groups, and on May 24, 2002, the corporate office issued the following statement: “The underwear for young girls was created with the intention to be lighthearted and cute. Any misinterpretation of that is purely in the eye of the beholder.”

Meanwhile, thong sales to children have never been better. In 2000, they generated $400,000 from seven- to twelve-year-olds; in 2002, that figure quadrupled to $1.6 million. Include girls thirteen to seventeen in 2002’s thong revenue, and the figure skyrockets to $156 million. And in order to look all the better in all those thongs, forty percent of girls nine and ten years old are trying to lose weight.

So when is fashion just wrong, and whose responsibility is it to draw the line? “I think in some ways it is oversexualized,” Tina Wells admitted freely. “But the companies that are doing it are making gazillions of dollars.

“Are they satisfying a consumer want, or are they creating it?” she asked. “Are they satisfying the consumer, really? I mean, take Bratz dolls, which are really the symbol of all things KGOY, very grown-up, glamorous dolls. It’s quite a sophisticated doll for a girl of five or six to be playing with. I don’t think there is a right answer. Everyone who is experiencing it is trying to figure out the borders between right or wrong.”

Bratz dolls aren’t the only toys to show the effects of KGOY. When Barbie was first introduced in this country in 1959, she was aimed at six- to ten-year-olds. Now, she’s big mainly with three- to five-year-olds. In the past decade alone, the average age of Barbie lovers has fallen by two years. Other toys show the effects of this downward push as well. While kids used to want new toys until they were at least twelve years old, nowadays the top-end age of a toy user is hovering closer to eight. After all, toys are for kids, and kids today don’t see themselves as kids. Focus groups conducted by Nickelodeon have confirmed that indeed, by eleven years old, children no longer think of themselves as children. They’re just teens waiting to happen. If tweens don’t want traditional toys, what do they want? They want, as one writer for The Age put it, “toys that recognize their financial enfranchisement.”The tweening of American childhood is not merely a matter of toys and fashion. As we encourage and allow younger children to look like adults, they apparently begin to walk the walk. In other words, a host of disturbing signs suggest that tweens are not only eschewing the goody-goody image childhood, but its substance as well.

Kate Kelly, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Raising a Teenager, has been deeply immersed in her local school district in Westchester County, just outside Manhattan, for the past fifteen years, and she speaks and writes frequently on teen issues. “These kids are having to make a lot more difficult decisions than kids ten or twelve years ago,” she told me. “The details start to pile up and get your attention. Our school has a ballroom dancing class for the sixth grade, and I remember how, about twelve years ago, the girls were all in Laura Ashley dresses, puffed sleeves, ballroom gowns, that sort of thing. Now we’ve got these short little black dresses on twelve-year-olds. We’ve got these little girls in this sexy attire.”

Once dressed for the part, kids seem to kick in with behavior to match. “Drinking is starting at an earlier age,” Kelly confirmed. “Half of middle-schoolers are now getting drunk—but that also means, of course, that half are not. An increasing number are having oral sex, so now we’re looking at the dangers of oral sex.”

Tweens are demonstrating many of the deviant behaviors we usually associate with the raging hormones of adolescence. While ninth and tenth grade used to be considered the general starting point for most risk behaviors, educators and psychologists recognize an unmistakable downward trajectory. Hard data about tweens and risk behavior is a little sketchy, partly because for many years most surveys and studies began with fifteen-year-olds. Until recently, it seemed absurd for researchers to interview ten-year-olds about their sexual activity and drug use.

But the data that do exist certainly show that kids who are having sex are doing so at earlier ages. Between 1988 and 1995, the percentage of girls saying they had had sex before age fifteen rose from eleven to nineteen (for boys the percentage held steady at twenty-one). So at least one in five middle school kids is sexually active, and probably more, because the KGOY trend has only accelerated in the decade since ’95. The American Association of University Women’s 1999 report, Voices of a Generation: Teenage Girls on Sex, School, and Self, concluded, “Pressure to have sex starts early (eleven-year-olds were the only group not to mention sex) and comes not just from boys, but from girls, too.”

Dr. Erika Karres is the author of Mean Chicks, Cliques, and Dirty Tricks. A former high school teacher and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she now writes and researches full time. “What you see now,” Karres told me in her faint German accent, “is that these kids get no more than about twenty minutes of teenagehood, and then they are adults. But what you need is this time from childhood to adulthood to accept duties that go along with maturing, such as looking out for other human beings.”

Karres was born at the outset of World War II in Magdeburg, a medium-sized German city not far from Berlin. The first years of her life were marked with conflict and human tragedy. She was five years old when Hitler committed suicide, and she maintains that her early years shaped her life goals and instilled in her a deep commitment to work for the good of other people. It’s a quality she’s not seeing so much in today’s young people. “Those things have been postponed. If you are going to make mini-adults out of twelve-year-olds, something is going to give, and it is going to be the inner growth. What is there left to look forward to, when you let them grow up at twelve? Drugs, premature sexual experiences? When these teenagers hit twenty years old, they hit a plateau and realize they haven’t really learned anything. We have a lot of washed-up twenty-year-olds. Not washed up permanently, but they are not as mature and responsible as previous generations of older teens used to be.”

The Girl Scouts of the United States published a report in 2000 called Girls Speak Out: Teens Before Their Time, which identified three areas of child development that are not working in sync for girls today. “Cognitive and physical development have accelerated, while emotional development often has not,” it stated. “The imbalance has led to stress and tension in eight- to twelve-year-old girls that were not formerly present. For example, while girls may know facts about sex and may even be physically mature, they may not fully understand what it means to be in an intimate relationship.”

The study also revealed that just as girls are confronted with difficult teen issues like dating and sex at increasingly early ages, they are learning that their families are often unwilling or unable to discuss such issues. Pressure to grow up fast puts great strain on girls who are not yet ready to cope with teenage feelings. Thanks to precocious physical development and accelerated cognitive maturity fed by a relentlessly sexual media—as well as expectations from peers, family, and their own inquisitiveness—girls look and behave like teenagers earlier than in previous generations. The dilemma is that these same girls do not have the emotional maturity, nor do they have the information, to match their accelerated aspirations and expectations. That’s when the stress and risk set in.

A passage from the report’s summary frames the central issues nicely: “Girls feel pressured to behave more like teens than young girls, even though they don’t quite understand what this means and are not emotionally ready for this change. This pressure is evidenced by anxiety about relationships with peers, relationships with boys, physical maturation, and family relationships. These girls want and need to speak out. They would be very grateful, they say, if they could speak about these issues in supportive and understanding environments that contain adults who will listen and help them get answers to personal questions. They want accurate, detailed, and appropriate information, and want to be able to rely on their mothers and other family members as confidantes because they are still strongly attached to their families at this age. It is important that family members acknowledge the phenomenon of developmental compression, while at the same time not prevent the girls from growing up.”

In generations past, traditional rites of passage—even the traditional debutante ball—were multigenerational and community-oriented. A young adult was welcomed to a new level of responsibility and respect, not just to a higher level of freedom. How unlike contemporary proms, many of which have become the scenes of such modern initiations into adulthood as drinking, using drugs, fist fights, drunk driving, and careless sex.

“Prom night feels like no rules apply,” Raising a Teenager’s Kate Kelly said. “We’ve had to combat a great deal of heavy drinking, kids drinking much more than they might on a regular weekend, kids having to be taken to the hospital. Many proms have gone to a busing system, with parents required to pick the kids up from the bus, because of these terrible problems.” In 2001, more than a third of youth under the age of twenty-one killed in alcohol-related fatalities died during April, May, and June—prom and graduation season—according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The most telling and tragic example of the prom as a symbol of “immature maturity” was the suburban New Jersey teenager who gave birth in the bathroom at her June 1997 prom, wrapped the healthy baby boy in plastic, dumped him in the trash to die, then returned to the dance floor. Critics eager to explain the crime in sociological terms agreed: This girl was a member of a generation out of control.

Questions and blame also gravitated naturally toward the girl’s parents. Indeed, where do the parents fit into this phenomenon? “In many cases they’re the ones willing to bankroll hotel rooms for prom night,” Kelly said. “The next trend, then, is the spring vacation trip for seniors. You’ve got a group of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds going to another part of the country, or an island, or maybe a different country altogether, with no parent along, no adult. You just have to think, someone is really insane.”

Therein, perhaps, lies the heart of the matter. For while our children are growing older younger, their parents are too often refusing to embrace adulthood, with all its inherent responsibilities and obligations of age. Conservative essayist Joseph Epstein recently published a lengthy opinion piece in The Weekly Standard on this very topic (facets of which, interestingly, radical liberals and conservatives are surprised to find themselves agreeing on). In “Perpetual Adolescence,” Epstein writes about life before the shift toward youth culture began, which he pinpoints in the decade or so following the 1951 publication of Catcher in the Rye: “Life in that different day was felt to observe the human equivalent of the Aristotelian unities: to have, like a good drama, a beginning, middle, and end. Each part, it was understood, had its own advantages and detractions, but the middle—adulthood—was the lengthiest and most earnest part, where everything serious happened and much was at stake. To violate the boundaries of any of the three divisions of life was to go against what was natural and thereby to appear unseemly, to put one’s world somehow out of joint, to be, let us face it, a touch, and perhaps more than a touch, grotesque.”

Never before, Epstein asserts, has it been more difficult to act one’s age. After all, how much of our economy, of the marketing industry, is based on generating more profit by convincing the young that they can seem older and the old that they can seem a lot younger?

“Time for the perpetual adolescent is curiously static,” he writes. “Time doesn’t seem to the perpetual adolescent the excruciatingly finite matter, the precious commodity, it indubitably is. For the perpetual adolescent, time is almost endlessly expandable ... Time enough to toss away one’s twenties, maybe even one’s thirties; forty is soon enough to get serious about life; maybe even fifty, when you think about it, is the best time really to get going in earnest.”

Seven-year-olds are reaching puberty, twelve-year-olds are having sex, teenage girls are getting fake breasts, and the whole lot of them are delving into alcohol and drugs in record numbers. There’s good reason to believe these outcomes are influenced by the twenty-eight hours a week American kids spend in front of the tube, and by having their desire to have more faster met with increasingly soft parental limits. So whose business is that? Clearly, Americans can’t agree on the rules of propriety in a culture that defines itself by a fierce attachment to the right of individuality and freedom of self-expression. That’s the shouting match that erupts whenever anyone starts pontificating about what ought to be done about the moral state of our youth. Parents can’t seem to make any sense out of the roar. Why should our kids?