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The dilemma for Emily and many other parents of her generation is that she wants to enjoy her children, to be liked by them, so she feels constrained not to crack down too hard. "When we were growing up, there was a big black line between us and our parents," she says. Now she wears sandals, socks and jeans, just like her kids. In the car with her husband and two children, they can all agree on music by Santana, the Beatles and the Doors. "In a way, that makes things easier," says Emily, "but on the other hand, when we tell them something, they just say, 'Whatever.'" Emily even bought a T shirt emblazoned with that word for her son, who refuses to wear it.
So Emily and her husband, a doctor, are left in a parental limbo familiar to her peers: she is on to her kids about smoking marijuana, but she knows that won't be enough to stop them. Next time she catches them, she swears, "I'll lock them in every afternoon"--but she looks doubtful even as she says it. Ultimately, she hopes, the striving for success they've grown up with will check the urge to rebel. "I want to be like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye and stop these kids from going off the cliff," she says. "But then I look at the breadth of the problem and think I can't do it."