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?

Whether or not it’s affecting their bodies, there’s little doubt it has affected kids’ brains. Parents and educators say they see girls being sexually aggressive at younger ages. Some might consider that a victory — teenage girls going toe-to-toe with boys on the horniness scale. The problem is, those girls seem to see themselves as merely sexual. Their cry isn’t “I am woman, hear me roar.” It’s “I am sex kitten, hear me purr.” Or perhaps it isn’t really about sex at all. When it comes to oral sex, girls tend to be on the giving end, rarely on the receiving end.

No less heartbreaking is the fact that many teenagers have downloaded adult attitudes about love. Talk to teenage girls, and you’ll hear some who sound world-weary about relationships they haven’t even had yet. “Mostly, guys and girls are just friends,” says Amy, a 14-year-old from Phoenixville, when I ask about relations between the sexes at her school. “We don’t really like to date. It just kind of messes things up.”

Sex, of course, is not the only area where teenagers have turned into cultural Mini-Me’s. There is also the issue of money. One recent afternoon, I am on the phone with my friend Steve, who is talking about his 14-year-old stepdaughter, Rachel, a freshman at a local parochial school.

“By the age of 13 or 14, these kids can drop designer names,” he complains. “Rachel’s grandmother just bought her a Prada purse. She shouldn’t even know what that is.

She does, though, in part because Prada — and the rest of corporate America — wants her to know. Sherie Saner says she recently did a fair amount of research on “tweens” and was astounded by what she found: “They are becoming the group that advertisers target the most, because all of their income is expendable, and they have a lot of it.” Teen Vogue might be ridiculous, but it isn’t an accident.

But kids like Rachel also know from Prada and Kate Spade because parents (or at least relatives) have been willing to fund teen consumer culture — sometimes to an astounding degree. MTV’s My Sweet Super 16 — a reality series chronicling the lavish birthday parties parents bankroll for their progeny — recently featured an episode about Hart, a junior at Episcopal Academy in Merion. (Hart is the son of caterer Peter Callahan and the stepson of clothing designer Josephine Sasso; their wedding was featured in Martha Stewart Living.) Near the end of the show, Peter revealed that the party, which was held in an Old City studio space and featured a bevy of dancers brought in from New York as eye candy, cost $250,000. And presumably that didn’t include all the duds Josephine Sasso doled out to some of Hart’s female friends, more or less as a bribe to get them to the party (which was competing with a school dance).