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?

But lately, at least one Main Line mother wonders if that was always the best thing. “In a lot of ways, I think we’ve caused the problem,” she says. “We’ve given these kids so much.”

As it turns out, the generation that took the parenting plunge a couple of decades back really did have a fundamentally different approach to child-rearing from its parents. Partly out of necessity (two-career couples, increasingly hectic schedules) and partly by design (the notion that everything in a kid’s life should be enriching), boomer parents more or less flip-flopped the way childhood had always been done. To oversimplify a bit: Things that were once left free and up to the kids — play, sports, spare time — became tightly structured and highly supervised, while adult things that previously involved at least some semblance of parental or cultural rules — dress, sex, spending money — became far looser. Mommy and Daddy honor your desire to dress like a $20 hooker, dear; just don’t let it interfere with your Italian lessons or SAT prep course — you only get one shot at fourth grade.

The result is a generation of teens who are bright, articulate and savvy about the ways of the world, but who’ve been given the freedom — or even forced — to deal with things they’re not quite ready for.

The most hot-button of those behaviors, clearly, is sex. As cable TV and the Internet have become integrated into our lives, the amount of sex out there to be seen and soaked up has grown exponentially. And not just in designed-to-provoke places like The O.C. or the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, but in more Middle American spots, too. A few years ago, JC Penney, of all companies, ran a commercial showing a teen girl in her room, wearing a pair of low-slung pants. “You can’t go to school looking like that,” her mother says, shaking her head. At which point the mom walks over and tugs the pants down.

For parents, the effect of all this sexual noise has been a growing uneasiness. The reason Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” and Monday Night Football’s TowelGate aroused such reactions wasn’t that parents feared their kids would turn to stone if they saw a nipple or an ass cheek. It was aggravation that the sex line seems to keep moving, that no place is safe anymore. The feeling is a bit like trying to escape a smoker who just won’t move. At a certain point, you want to turn around and snap, “Look, I don’t care if you smoke, but would you please not do it near me?”

We know the impact of secondhand smoke. How about secondhand sex? Some speculate it’s actually changed kids’ bodies. “The age of puberty for girls used to be 12; now it’s as early as eight,” says Sherie Saner, a psychologist at the Baldwin School. “The hormones in our food may have something to do with it. But some experts say that as we get exposed to more mature images, we start maturing earlier.”