Who's In Charge Here?

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That's the baby-boomer indictment in a nutshell, but there's a more benign way to interpret this generation's parenting. Those who grew up with emotionally remote parents who rarely got right down on the floor to play, who wouldn't think of listening respectfully to their six-year-old's opinions or explain why the rules are what they are, have tried to build a very different bond with their children. They are far more fluent in the language of emotional trauma and intent on not repeating their parents' mistakes. What's more, having prolonged childhoods, many parents today identify powerfully with their kids. But as Horn notes, "It's difficult to set limits with your children if your primary goal is to be liked. What parents need to understand is that their primary job is being a parent, not being their kids' friend."

It is a natural, primitive instinct to want to make your child happy and protect him from harm or pain. But that instinct, if not tempered, also comes with a cost. Adolescents can't learn to become emotionally resilient if they don't get any practice with frustration or failure inside their protective cocoons. Sean Stevenson, a fifth-grade teacher in Montgomery County, Md., says parents always say they want discipline and order in the classroom, but if it's their child who breaks the rules, they want an exemption. "They don't want the punishment to be enforced," says Stevenson. "They want to excuse the behavior. 'It's something in the child's past. Something else set him off. He just needs to be told, and it won't happen again.'"

In September, Harvard psychologist Dan Kindlon, co-author of the best-selling 1999 book Raising Cain, will publish Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age, in which he warns parents against spoiling their children either materially or emotionally, against trying to make kids' lives perfect. Using the body's immune system as a metaphor, Kindlon argues, "The body cannot learn to adapt to stress unless it experiences it. Indulged children are often less able to cope with stress because their parents have created an atmosphere where their whims are indulged, where they have always assumed...that they're entitled and that life should be a bed of roses."

The parents Kindlon interviewed expressed the bewilderment that many parents reveal in the face of today's challenging parenting environment. Almost half said they were less strict than their parents had been. And they too, like the parents in the TIME/CNN poll, pleaded overwhelmingly guilty to indulging their children too much. "It's not just a little ironic," Kindlon writes, "that our success and newfound prosperity--the very accomplishments and good fortune that we so desperately desire to share with our children--put them at risk."

So the job of parenting is harder than ever, parents say they don't think they are doing it very well, and lots of people on the sidelines are inclined to agree. But for all the self-doubt, it is still worth asking: Are today's parents really doing such a terrible job? Are kids today actually turning out so bad?

As far as one can register these things, the evidence actually suggests the opposite. Today's teenagers are twice as likely to do volunteer work as teens 20 years ago, they are drinking less, driving drunk less, having far fewer babies and fewer abortions, and committing considerably less violence. Last year math SAT scores hit a 30-year high, and college-admissions officers talk about how tough the competition is to get into top schools because the applicants are so focused and talented. "We have a great generation of young people right under our noses right now," observes Steven Culbertson, head of Youth Service America, a Washington resource center for volunteering, "and nobody knows it."

Maybe this is some kind of uncanny coincidence, that kids are doing this well despite the way they are being raised rather than because of it. Maybe virtue is their form of adolescent rebellion against parents who indulged every vice. Or it could be that the get-down-on-the-floor, consult- the-child, share-the-power, cushion-the- knocks approach isn't entirely wrong-headed. Perhaps those tendencies have done a lot of good for kids, and what's called for is not a reversal but a step back from extremes.

Certainly that is what many parents are starting to do. "I had one over-the-top birthday party for my child, and I'll never do it again," says Carrie Fisher, daughter of Hollywood star Debbie Reynolds and now the mother of nine-year-old Billie. "She got an elephant, and that's all I'll have to say. It will never happen again. I felt like the biggest ass." Fisher had her epiphany when she heard her daughter bragging to a friend, "My swimming pool is bigger than yours." That prompted some new rules. Among other things, Billie has to clean up her room, a change from Princess Leia's own childhood. "I always thought the fairies did it," she says, laughing. "When I moved into my first apartment, I didn't understand how there were rings in the tub and hair in the sink."