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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."
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.'"