Features: The Secret Life of Your Teen

A generation of parents determined to raise perfect children is now being confronted with anything but. What happened?

Part of what has them so distraught, of course, is the age-old tension between generations. Indeed, current complaints about kids’ constant instant-messaging are really just an update of “Would you please get off that phone?!” That said, there is plenty of evidence that, particularly when it comes to sex, these are not your father’s teenagers.

“I asked my 14-year-old son’s girlfriend what she wanted for her birthday,” says Cindy, a single mother of two boys who lives in West Chester. “She told me she wanted to go to Hooters, so she could see what her competition looked like.” (Adds Cindy, “I took her. I think she saw the girls really weren’t that hot.”)

Then there are the blowjobs. “You’ve heard about the oral sex, right?” three different parents asked me while I worked on this story. The prevalence of oral sex among teenagers — and the view of many that it’s not really sex — has lately caught the attention of everyone from Oprah to Katie Couric. Apparently, it’s a growing phenomenon — several Main Line educators say they’ve seen episodes of it as early as middle school. And kids affirm that it happens.

“There’s this girl in my grade who, um, gives blowjobs constantly,” says a sophomore who attends a Main Line private school. “I mean, in one weekend she could give five.” One recipient, according to the story making the rounds, was a 20-something stranger standing by his car who had simply called out to the girl and her friends, “Anyone want to blow me?” Ask, apparently, and ye shall receive.

This is not to say that every teen has gone wild. But particularly in some of Philadelphia’s more affluent suburbs, there is a deep and growing fear about the culture teens are living in. It’s a world where dating is passé, and no-strings-attached sex is trendy. Where drinking and drugs aren’t just available, they’re expected. Where you’re nobody if you aren’t packing a cell phone and a Visa Bucks card. Little wonder there’s a serious outbreak of teen angst. Only this time, it’s the teens’ parents who are feeling forlorn and anxious.

Now, if you have been paying attention to the world for the past three or four decades, you’ll note a couple of ironies here, starting with the fact that this generation of parents caused its own parental units — a pause here, please, in loving memory of the Coneheads — more than a fair share of headaches. More to the point, this was the generation that was so earnest about parenting its kids. (Indeed, they were the first to figure out “parent” could be used as a verb.) They waited until they were “financially ready” to conceive, pumped pre-birth Mozart into their wombs, and never let their new arrivals touch toys that weren’t educational. More than anything, they made sure that the lines of communication were always open, so that their children would make “healthy choices.”