Who's In Charge Here?

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But a lot about being a millennial parent is actually new, and hard. Prosperity is a great gift, and these are lucky, peaceful times, but in some respects it is more difficult to be a parent now than when our parents were at the wheel. Today's prosperity has been fueled by people working longer hours than ever, and it is especially challenging to parent creatively and well when you're strung out and exhausted. The extended-family structure that once shared the burdens and reinforced values has frayed. Nothing breeds wretched excess like divorced parents competing with each other and feeling guilty to boot. It's not an option, as it once was, to let kids roam free outside after school, bike over to a friend's house, hang out with cousins or grandparents. The streets are not safe and the family is scattered, so kids are often left alone, inside, with the TV and all its messages.

Advertising targets children as never before, creating cravings that are hard to ignore but impossible to satisfy. These days $3 billion is spent annually on advertising that is directed at kids--more than 20 times the amount a decade ago. Nearly half of all U.S. parents say their kids ask for things by brand names by age 5. "I might mention to a child that the dress she is wearing is cute," says Marci Sperling Flynn, a preschool director in Oak Park, Ill., "and she'll say, 'It's Calvin Klein.' Kids shouldn't know about designers at age 4. They should be oblivious to this stuff."

Children have never wielded this much power in the marketplace. In 1984 children were estimated to influence about $50 billion of U.S. parents' purchases; the figure is expected to approach $300 billion this year. According to the Maryland-based Center for a New American Dream, which dispenses antidotes for raging consumerism, two-thirds of parents say their kids define their self-worth in terms of possessions; half say their kids prefer to go to a shopping mall than to go hiking or on a family outing; and a majority admit to buying their children products they disapprove of--products that may even be bad for them--because the kids said they "needed" the items to fit in with their friends.

Peer pressure can hit lower-income families especially hard. George Valadez, a hot-dog and beer vendor at Chicago's Wrigley Field, has sole custody of his three young kids. His concept of being a good provider is to pour every spare cent into them. The family's two-bedroom apartment is crammed with five television sets, three video-game consoles and two VCRs. Next month his kids want to attend a church camp in Michigan that costs $100 a child. So two weeks ago, abandoning their custom of giving away outgrown clothes and toys to neighbors, the family held its first yard sale to raise cash.

Technology also contributes to the erosion of parental authority. Video games are about letting kids manipulate reality, bend it to their will, which means that when they get up at last from the console, the loss of power is hard to handle. You can't click your little brother out of existence. Plus, no generation has had access to this much information, along with the ability to share it and twist it. Teenagers can re-create themselves, invent a new identity online, escape the boundaries of the household into a very private online world with few guardrails. As Michael Lewis argues in his new book, Next: The Future Just Happened, a world in which 14-year-olds can manipulate the stock market and 19-year-olds can threaten the whole music industry represents a huge shift in the balance of power.

In some ways the baby boomers were uniquely ill equipped to handle such broad parenting challenges. So eager to Question Authority when they were flower children, the boomers are reluctant to exercise it now. "This is overly harsh, overly cynical, but there's a reason why the baby-boom generation has been called the Me generation," says Wade Horn, a clinical child psychologist and President Bush's assistant secretary for family support at the Department of Health and Human Services. "They spent the 1950s being spoiled, spent the 1960s having a decade-long temper tantrum because the world was not precisely as they wanted it to be, spent the 1970s having the best sex and drugs they could find, the 1980s acquiring things and the 1990s trying to have the most perfect children. And not because they felt an obligation to the next generation to rear them to be healthy, well-adjusted adults, but because they wanted to have bragging rights."