Who's In Charge Here?

(4 of 4)

Miami interior decorator Nury Feria, the mother of two teenagers, launched her own little crusade within her job as a designer of children's bedrooms. She was finding herself creating rooms that were more like separate apartments. "Large-screen TVs, computers with individual Internet access, refrigerators, sound systems, video-game centers, leather sofas--the only thing missing was a pool," she says. "I realized that as the designer, I'm also supposed to help shape the lifestyle of the kids, and I didn't like a lot of what I was doing in that regard." So she began subtly trying to guide her clients away from certain amenities, advising some parents to scale back on the queen-size beds for seven-year-old girls or the themed bathrooms that rivaled the Small World ride at Disney World.

Despite incessant requests for a Nintendo system by her twin nine-year-old boys, one mom says she compromises by renting a Nintendo console from Blockbuster a few times a year for $30 each time. "It costs me more to do this, and we could afford to buy it. But I don't want video games in my house all the time. This is our compromise," she says. "My boys are the type to sit there with it all the time."

Dawn Maynard, 44, is a personal trainer and the mother of two boys, 14 and 15. An immigrant from Guyana, she lives in Bethesda, Md., and admits that she spoils her sons with electronics, even though she wishes she didn't. Still, she sees the war being fought all around her and counts the ways she has not surrendered. Some neighbors rented their son a limo to go to the prom. It seated 24. "My kids are in a county-run math camp that costs less than $200 for the entire three weeks. My sons' best friend is at golf camp for $4,000. I'm always fighting peer pressure with my sons."

All parents have to navigate these social, commercial and psychic pressures; it is how they respond that sets them apart. Many parents talk about this as the great struggle of their households. They find themselves quietly shedding old friends when they diverge over discipline; they shop online to avoid the temptation their kids face up and down the endless aisles; they attend workshops and buy books to help bolster their resolve. If you doubt the guerrilla war, just check in with groups like the Center for a New American Dream: three years ago its website had fewer than 15,000 hits a month; today it gets more than 1.5 million.

Parents joke about looking for other "Amish" parents who will reinforce the messages they are trying to send. "Family dating" is an art form all its own, a feat of social chemistry that makes being 25 and single seem easy. In some circles family dating is still driven by traditional hierarchies of status and class, or off-hours' professional networking, or a shared love of sailing or baseball. But for today's concerned parents, it is increasingly driven by values, by sharing a general worldview on everything from TV watching to candy distribution to curfews. Otherwise, time spent together is just too stressful and explosive.

Of course, families engaged in a rollback still have to live in a world where plenty of other children are overindulged. If you live next door to such a kid, or he's thrown together with yours at school or soccer, it can be a challenge always to be explaining why Johnny gets to have marshmallows for breakfast and your kids don't. But the rules send your kids a message all their own, beyond the fact that marshmallows rot their teeth. The rules are a constant reminder that Mom and Dad care, that the kids' health is important to you, that kids are not home alone. And most of all, that it's O.K. to be different.

Parents who give up and back off leave their children at the mercy of a merciless culture. The ones who stand firm and stay involved often find their families grow closer, their kids stronger from being exposed to the toxins around them and building resistance to them. Ariana Marion ended up getting her car. She graduated with honors in June and heads to Wellesley in the fall. "There's a part of us that says we've still given them too much," says her mother Diane, "that wants to take them to live on a farm for a few years and drive a tractor. But we definitely feel we did the right thing by making her earn the car, by making her wait. And the best thing for us as parents was to learn that she was the kind of girl, and now woman, who could step up to the challenge."