4. PARENTS WHO NEED PARENTS

The deterioration in middle-aged adult behavior has driven virtually every major American social problem over the past 25 years.

—MIKE MALES1

 

Marco Andreoli was thirty years old in 2002 when Italy’s highest court ordered Marco’s father to pay Marco roughly €775 ($1,000) a month until Marco found a job that “fit his aspirations.”

Alas, this could take a while. Marco had a law degree, a house on one of Naple’s swankiest streets, and joint ownership of an investment fund worth more than £300,000 ($390,000). Clearly, not just any job would do. He also had zero relationship with his father, who was estranged from his mother. “How can you justify a decision like that?” his father Giuseppe Andreoli wondered after the court ordered him to pony up and support Marco in the style to which his son might never grow unaccustomed. “I would like someone to explain it to me.”2

It’s unlikely that the judges’ rationale, as recounted in the British paper The Guardian, satisfied old Giuseppe. “The judges said that a parent’s duty of maintenance did not expire when their children reached adulthood, but continued unchanged until they were able to prove either that their children had reached economic independence or had failed to do so through culpable inertia.” The newspaper continued: “An adult son who refused work that did not reflect his training, abilities and personal interests could not be held to blame.” In other words, little chick might well outgrow the family nest, but he certainly didn’t have to fly away until he found that perfect perch—running Fiat? singing Pagliacci?—while Dad, poor sap, goes on playing early bird to catch Junior a worm.

If this court declaration against independence gives new meaning to the term “nanny-state,” it also offers new insight into why Italy is a country where more than one in three Italians in their thirties lives at home with parents. Among Italian sons, ages eighteen to thirty, the number skyrockets to 85 percent, as compared to 20 percent of British adult sons and 25 percent of American adult sons.3 “Unfortunately, we continue to be the mummy’s boys of Europe,” commented Simone Baldelli, youth coordinator for the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. “The family, instead of being considered a fundamental cell for children’s education and training, becomes a social safety net.”4

No U.S. court is likely to venture this far, far out into child-friendly law. But the family-as-social-safety-net is nonetheless an American institution. And it is an ever-expanding one as educational costs, for example, continue to rise to insurmountable heights. Such costs are driving higher-educated sons and daughters in particular to rely on parental largesse well into adulthood, which so many now begin deeply in debt. The average college graduate leaves college not only with a diploma these days, but also debt amounting to $25,760. Little wonder Junior with his BA comes knocking on Mom and Dad’s door, which seems to remain open to him indefinitely. One survey of recent college graduates found almost one-third still living at home more than a year past graduation—not exactly the surest way to “grow up.”5

But not only do parents tend to support Junior no matter how old he is, but they also support him no matter what he does—and even as a minor. Instead of running that cell for education and training that the Italian minister mentioned, post–grown-up parents in America carry out the kind of nonjudgmental “duty of maintenance” that the Italian court cited in order to safeguard American children’s increasingly high-wire lifestyles.

The very odd fact is, Boomer (and Boomer-plus) parents today expect, prepare, and even enable their youngsters to encounter and engage in a welter of antibourgeois, even criminal, activities. These range from a berserk kind of sexual adventurism, to the mortal dangers of mind-altering drugs and alchohol. They include a spectrum of rude, crude, and formerly socially unacceptable behaviors, such as what is still known as, even in these value-neutral times, “bad” language. Funny how these same habits and behaviors fit in with the fabled rock ’n’ roll lifestyle of hedonistic abandon. Less funny is the realization that this same lifestyle—the one so many adolescents lead, or try to—is only made possible by Mom, Dad, and their underlying soft spot for the ethos of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.

Certainly, it’s not every kid who engages in such practices, any more than it is every parent who enables him to. But it’s something to reckon with that every kid is unavoidably and indelibly marked by them. For example, even in rejecting drug use, the straightest-arrow teen is shaped and defined by his awareness of drugs. In taking a “virginity pledge” to remain chaste, a youngster has acknowledged mainstream notions about promiscuity in teen culture. Innocence has always been nullified by exposure, and good has always been defined, at least tangentially, by resistance to bad. But there is something new and disturbing in the modern-day incarnation of this age-old human condition.

For one thing, a state of exposure—not innocence—now coincides with the earliest stirrings of self-awareness that usually begin with life after Candy Land. Twenty years ago, Dartmouth College made shocking headlines for equipping incoming college freshmen not just with everything they needed to know about sex, but rather everything they needed to engage in it. And I mean everything. Along with various examples of drugstore birth control, the freshman sex kit included an “oral dam,” a device I decided at the time I would probably prefer to avoid knowledge of, carnal or otherwise. Back then, a college setting up eighteen-year-olds for sexual experimentation seemed outrageous. Today, middle school students in Maryland learn “buying a condom is not as scary as you think.”6 In Wisconsin, they can pick them up for free at a “health” fair.7 First-graders in North Carolina get primed on homosexual marriage with King & King, a storybook about a handsome prince who spurns a run of princesses for a handsome prince of his own.8 New Jersey put together a sex ed kit that, among other things, gives elementary school students, the lowdown on masturbation.9 Kindergartners in New York learn the mechanics of AIDS transmission.10

What happened to innocence? No longer considered a boon to virtuous behavior, innocence—of drugs, of sex, of homosexual princes, and of oral dams—is today deemed a handicap, an affliction to be cured as quickly as possible. Intensive treatment takes place both in the classroom and through the culture. Meanwhile, the notion of virtue itself—“conformity to a standard of right,” Webster’s says—is out altogether, replaced by the multifarious “values” of a relativistic culture. By definition, these values conform to no standard of right. This means that not only is virtue no longer its own reward, it’s not even one of the door prizes.

As society spurns innocence in favor of exposure, and virtue in favor of values, it no longer sees any point in inculcating “good” or “moral” behavior in its young. Rather, it labors to encourage “better choices.” Instead of virtues to live by, society provides “news you can use” about hygiene, about cliques, about tattoos, about sex, about STDs, about alchohol, about drunk driving, about rape, about gang rape, about date rape, about date-rape drugs, about other drugs … the list of vices to bone up on is endless.

Take the example of drugs. The object of drug prevention programs, obviously, is to prevent youngsters from using and becoming dependent on illegal and destructive drugs. To that end, they are given in-depth schooling on the drug world, from the finer points of freebasing cocaine, to the assorted hardware of drug use, to the lingo of the streets. A 2005 report out of Washington state brought news of a sheriff’s deputy who routinely took classrooms of high school students through a cooktop recipe for producing methamphetamine.11 This comprehensive and methodical demystification of the dark side is considered our greatest tool to deter drug use. And maybe it is. But it says something about our society that not only do we assiduously avoid making that dark side taboo, we also purposefully familiarize our kids with it without any regard for its impact on the sensibility of young people. That is, in order to teach our young to function “safely” in a culture of exposure, we have decided, as guardians, as educators, to jade and coarsen them in concert with that culture of exposure, the all-enveloping, virtually inescapable media that dominate the young in particular. Rather than instill virtuous behaviors based on the judgment that it is “bad” to use drugs, or “bad” to engage in premarital sex, we choose to build a logical case against vice based only on the risks involved. And these we neutralize by also, logically, teaching the young to “take precautions.” It is a halfhearted argument at best for “healthy” behavior. Without making such behaviors anathema, society merely tries to talk its jaded young out of indulging in them—and for no “good” reason.

But why the ambivalence? Examining the malignant influence of Timothy Leary, the most notorious drug pusher of them all, Roger Kimball analyzed the high-flown bunkum Leary sold to American elites glamorizing drug use in his day: namely, the Leary creed that turning on, tuning in, and dropping out is the way to enlarge human consciousness, power, and desire. “What depths of credulity,” Kimball writes, “must be plumbed before someone could mistake a deliberate pharmacological assault on the nervous system for an experience of divine truth?”12 An excellent question. But even as the proselytizers of druggy wisdom have by now burnt out to pasture on society’s edges, more or less, such credulity still energizes and directs the cultural mainstream.

The fact is, as Kimball points out, Leary left more than a chemical mythology behind him. While regarded as a semibeloved crank today, a gonzo kind of Uncle LSD—a status that is downright creepy—Leary, along with his fellow champions of “chemical emancipation,” produced a legacy with lasting consequences. Together, Kimball writes, they “helped to acclimatize our entire culture to a demand for blind emotional transport.” This unslakeable demand for sensationalist “highs” of every kind—from eardrum-blasting music, to “extreme” sports pursuits, to computer-enhanced screen mayhem—helps explain why as a society we acknowledge the perils of drugs, for example, but as a culture we fail to stigmatize the attraction. Indeed, we have even attributed to that attraction a large measure of moral superiority. It is as if the empty pursuit of release—“blind emotional transport”—is thought to absolve mankind of all complicity in the storied corruptions of a humdrum world. Such pursuit, even sympathy for such pursuit, allows one to avoid or deny the realization that limitations—of obligation, of responsibility, of ability, of luck—necessarily constrain the life worth living. Such pursuit, even sympathy for such pursuit, becomes a way to avoid the hard work of making the constrained life worth living. Little wonder the insatiable rock ’n’ roll outlaw—not the clean-living lawman—inspires our cultural imagination. And little wonder we find the clean-living lifestyle such a hard sell to kids. Socially acceptable, it remains a cultural drag.

This fact as much as anything else explains why it is that parents in our day settle for keeping their children safe. “Innocent” and “good” aren’t even on the table. Keep them “safe” from drugs. Keep them “safe” from sex—or, rather, “safe” in sex. Parents want to give their kids “a place to go,” presumably to be “safe” from drugs and in sex (or vice versa). It’s not exactly the language of the apocalypse, but the tremulous way middle-class parents talk about their ridiculously privileged, middle-class kids—threatened by no press-gang, slavers, famine, plague, or pestilence—has the overwrought sound of forced melodrama about it. Of course, these same parents who want to keep their kids “safe” with “a place to go” also want to make sure the kids “feel good about themselves” at the same time, which somehow takes the sting out of the Sturm und Drang.

That place-to-go-to-be-safe-while-feeling-good-about-themselves could be a library or tennis court, but it’s more likely to be a rec room for a sexy coed sleepover, or a rousing round of prom night alchohol poisoning. This is parenting-by-containment, a strategy reminiscent of policing tactics that seek to restrict the vice world to a so-called red-light district. Red-light-district parenting tries to contain adolescent vice to the home. To whit: The Colorado mother who pled guilty in 2005 to charges of sexual assault and contributing to the delinquency of a minor for allegedly providing marijuana, methamphetamine, and alchohol to high school boys in her home reportedly told police she was always “responsible” in never letting them leave the premises intoxicated.13

Sometimes, red-light-district parenting extends beyond the family home. Patrick McNeill rented three $199 hotel rooms on New Year’s Eve in Harrison, New York, to keep his son and his son’s fifteen- to nineteen-year-old pals “safe” while they rang in 2003 unsupervised—at least, that is, until police showed up to make twenty-six arrests on charges related to the presence of beer, hard liquor, and marijuana. McNeill didn’t speak to the press, but Robert Morabito, a family friend and Rye town supervisor, was reported to have argued that not only were the teens “safe” at the hotel, they were also “responsible.”

If I know [my children] are going to be someplace—either a hotel or a house—it gives me a sense of security. There’s always a chance that alchohol will be involved at that age. Let’s face it, you and I know it happens. I think these children chose to be responsible and, unfortunately, they got in trouble for it.14

“Someplace”—hotel, house—equals “security”? If underage teens drinking the night away qualify as safe, not to mention responsible, then I suppose these dads should star in Father Knows Best. Sure, so long as the youngsters were drinking and drugging “someplace,” they weren’t driving drunk or drugged on the road, but that’s a pretty narrow definition of “security.” And what happens when they leave “someplace” to go “someplace” else? One of the sadder, stranger ironies of this case is that the safety-conscious, room-renting father, Patrick McNeill, had earlier sued the Manhattan bar—its corporate owner, the stockholders, and several employees—where his older son, Patrick McNeill, Jr., had become greatly intoxicated before drowning in the East River one night in 1997. According to The Journal News, the law under which McNeill sued the bar allows courts “to impose liability for negligence on sellers of alchoholic beverages for sales to people under the legal drinking age or those who are obviously intoxicated.”

Would that we could count on parents to meet, at least, the sort of standard the law sets for bar owners. But these are the parents who need parents. Unfortunately, they have children instead—children to whom they give a de facto green light for red-light activities not in the children’s best interests. Because just as virtue is no longer a cultural given, neither are “best interests.” Like society, parents just hope Junior will make “better choices.”

Based on what, exactly? The fabled “better choices” we hear about are inspired by neither self-respect nor moral grounding, once building blocks of bona fide parental guidance. All Junior needs these days, so the theory goes, is “information,” and plenty of it. In Fairfax County, Virginia, tenth-grade sex education students, for example, learn a most expansive definition of “abstinence,” ranging from, well, abstinence, to all sexual activity short of intercourse. They are then “advised to choose which definition best suits their individual values.” As one teacher put it, “We’re not endorsing anything. We’re just giving information.”15 But “information” doesn’t tell the whole story. Remember the Spur Posse? In the mid-1990s, this gang of nice middle-class boys from Lakeland, California, had all the information they needed to practice “safe sex” when they competed with one another for the most “scores”—intercourse—with local girls. (The winner, on being arrested for molesting a minor, age ten, claimed a tally of sixty-three.) What, Posse members wondered, had they done wrong? “They pass out condoms, teach sex education and pregnancy this and pregnancy that,” one of the boys said. “But they don’t teach us any rules.”16

Author Kay S. Hymowitz pinpoints exactly why preparing youngsters to embark on a life not so much well-lived, but based on “informed decision-making” is doomed to fail. “The decision-making model assumes that kids already posess the values, beliefs, and self-awareness that go into such decisions,” she writes. “Experts never seem to consider where the values, beliefs, and self-awareness behind these choices come from. Though these are all clearly a product of gradual cultural learning, experts act as if they are magically part of teen identity.”17 They are not. But today’s grown-ups, parents included, have forgotten this—if they ever knew it.

Guided by what Hymowitz has called an “ethos of nonjudgmentalism,” such parents have become little more than caretakers, manning fairly useless stations along the social safety net. These stations include the rock concert “quiet room,” those improvised hideouts many venues provide for parents who would like to accompany their children to a concert while remaining out of earshot. From just such a quiet room at a Marilyn Manson concert in Washington, D.C., “each time a teenager was wheeled past the room from the mosh pit to the first-aid station, the parents raced to the door to make sure the afflicted was not theirs.”18 This is parenting by process of elimination. Other stations include a freak-dance floor in Washington state, where parental “chaperones” pride themselves on keeping things, if not clean, then “safe.”19 And “safe” it probably was—as “safe” as any professional pole-dancing strip club. This is parenting according to OSHA. The ubiquitous cell phone is another safety-net accessory, a “virtual umbilical cord,” as a Florida writer put it, between herself and her twelve-year-old in the mosh pit at a “punk-pop” festival. (“I’m okay,” the daughter yelled into her cell phone. “I’m going to body surf now.”20) Wireless parenting? It’s not that such concern isn’t genuine. But it’s useless in warding off harm—bodily or mental—and it doesn’t teach children to protect themselves. Without a resilient set of moral beliefs, the most intensive parental involvement and monitoring leave the parental safety net riddled with gaping holes.

Nothing better illustrates the failures of the safety net than what now passes for spring break. What originated as the Easter holiday cum school-sanctioned week off in the spring has morphed into an MTV-inspired, parentally supported debauch for teens without so much as a term paper for a fig leaf. Only a post-grown-up culture could go along with the bizarre ritual: Every spring, generally law-abiding, maybe churchgoing, and almost certainly PTA-belonging American Babbitts pack their unchaperoned, often underage boys and girls onto airplanes that fly hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away to a shore where alcohol flows, hallucinatory drugs are available, and rampant, often public sexuality—on a bar top, on the beach—is the main attraction. And almost invariably these parents do so against their will.

“It’s not like we have a choice. They didn’t ask. They pretty much told us they were going,” said one mother to the Detroit Free Press, which in recent years has made parental spring break angst something of a perrenial spring break feature.21 It is a study well worth undertaking, particularly as conducted in 2001 by reporter Tamara Audi. It illustrates a balance of family power that is absurdly out of whack. “We”—parents who raise, finance (such trips typically cost between $800 and $2,000), and generally sweat blood for their offspring—have no choice; “they”—financially dependent, emotionally immature, undoubtedly spoiled minors—tell us what’s what. And why not? If anything, this decision to fly away—the product of intensive research into MTV specials and beer commercials—is the quintessential “informed choice.”

Such is the dubious triumph of adolescent desire untrammeled by rules related to virtue. And such is the concrete evidence of how deeply entrenched the primacy of the adolescent experience has become. There is, in our society, an innately reflexive deference to juvenile desires—in this case, a nightmare of booze and sex come true—and it reveals a startling absence of will in the adult population. So much for self-esteem—that is, Mom’s and Dad’s. Depravity may not be a family value, exactly, but due to their acquiescence, they have made it the universal experience, even the assumed right, of all too many children. Reporting on the run-up to spring break, Tamara Audi of the Detroit Free Press elaborated on the phenomenon.

“I’m nervous. I don’t like it,” said Beverly Boyd, whose son Charles [was going to Cancún]. When the travel agent told a story about a teen getting hurt by jumping from balcony to balcony while drunk, Boyd said: “I don’t want him to go but he’s 18. I don’t have a choice.”

Even parents of 17-year-olds, parents who paid for their kids to go, said they felt powerless to stop them.…

When Ruth Goldfaden’s 17-year-old daughter Alise Anaya approached her about a spring break to Cancún, “I said no way,” the Dearborn mother said.

But after a few parents gave permission to their daughters, Goldfaden found it harder to say no.

“It’s a dilemma. One parent gives in and then you’re all giving in because you thought the other ones did, so I should too,” said Goldfaden. She finally gave her permission for Alise to travel unchaperoned to Cancún with 10 girlfriends. [Emphasis added.]22

None of which is exactly Churchillian. But parents aren’t the only spinally challenged adults out there.

In the Grosse Pointe, the pressure to send a teen on spring break is so great, a principal acknowledged the phenomenon in a letter to parents this spring.

“I know it’s difficult to deny your children this opportunity. There is considerable peer pressure to be involved in these trips,” wrote Grosse Pointe South High Principal Benjamin Walker in his letter to parents.

“After the students return to school I hear stories that truly concern me. Stories of substance and alchohol abuse, unwanted sexual advances from other students and sometimes adults, and other experiences that you and I do not want for our students.”

Yet despite that, Walker’s letter concludes: “I am not necessarily suggesting that you deny your children this chance to travel. I’m not sure I could do it.” [Emphasis added.]23

Too bad this wasn’t a resignation letter. The fact is, “To Cancún or Not to Cancún” is hardly a question to stump Hamlet, Dear Abby, or Yogi Bear. A week at the beach, where blowing up a condom on a “booze cruise” rates as a cultural event, just isn’t on a par with the Parthenon by moonlight—a fact the Free Press report on teenage spring-breakers at the Screw Party at Club La Boom makes pretty clear.

Well into the night at last week’s party, drunken teenagers removed their clothes on the dance floor. A group of three boys danced on the bar and stripped naked. Girls dancing nearby spanked them. The boys reached for the faces of the girls below them on the dance floor and beckoned them to perform a sex act. A few did; others were repelled.

Another girl in a blue-and-white halter top danced on the other side of the bar, switching from dance partner to dance partner, and kissing each one. She pulled her top down around her waist. Teenage boys swarmed her, kissing her face and body. Other boys undid her shorts. She threw her head back, as if gulping for air. A young man on the fringe stuck his finger in her mouth. With his free hand, he videotaped her.24

To their limited credit, most parents fail to find such “travel” broadening; but they let their children go anyway. In fact, to try to ensure that the kids keep things straight and narrow—or at least make sure they return “safely” to their rooms at some point—a sizable subherd of the cowed parental crowd is actually accompanying their young to Cancún these days, staying in hotels some distance from the kiddies.

“There was no way we were going to let them go without us,” said Tina Phalen, who chaperoned her 17-year-old daughter Katie on a trip to Cancún last week with a large group of parents and friends from Fenton. The teens, 50 friends from the junior and senior classes of Lake Fenton High School, stayed in a hotel next door to a group of 40 parents.

The parents in the group said they expected their kids would drink, many of them to excess, at nightclubs and by the pool.

“It’s not that we like it. It’s not that we’re OK with it, but it’s naive to think it doesn’t happen,” said Donna Warren, whose 17-year-old son Jase [sic] was part of the Fenton group. “At least we’re here if they need us.”25

But so are paramedics. And paramedics don’t intentionally place children at risk in the first place. Being “here if they need us” just isn’t an impressive act of parenting, particularly when “here” includes places children should be nowhere near. Such as “Spring Break Jail,” the local lockup for Cancún tourists. While parents hunkered down by the hotel phone—one mother instructed her daughter to call whenever she returned to her hotel room—the Free Press’s Tamara Audi checked out the action at the jail where some undisclosed number of spring-breakers end up every year.

At 4 A.M. on Tuesday of last week, Cancun police officer Manuel Cervantes brought in a sobbing 17-year-old girl from Macomb County who was arrested while having sex on the beach behind a popular club. The teenage boy she was with, Cervantes said, “got away from us. He got up and ran, ran, ran. And she was screaming ‘Come back, don’t leave me!’ He never looked back.”

The girl stood in the corner of the jailhouse office shaking. Sand was caked on her face, on her stomach and legs. Her clothes, a black halter top and shorts, were twisted. Her shoulder-length hair was matted and damp. Dark eye makeup was smeared across her cheeks. She cried into her hands, “I want to go home. I want to go home.”26

Whenever I read this, I get angry all over again—furious at the adults who exposed this young girl to a nightmare of degradation she will wake up from but never forget. Not even a cell phone call to Mom-alone-by-the-telephone would have saved this kid, or others like her, from anything—not from alcohol poisoning, not from sexual assault, and not from the lasting mortification of the predawn arrest.

Strangely enough, though, having dispensed with all manner of sexual stigmas, society no longer takes such humiliations seriously. The experiential innocence of virginity and the mental delicacy of youth have long fallen into ill-repute, either discarded as forgotten trophies of sexual liberation, or designated expendable hostages to feminist success. But this doesn’t mean that innocence and purity offer nothing of value to the young—particularly to young girls. Might not Cancún Girl have found in their retention a welcome protection—a virtue that really was its own reward? And even if the answer is no—mental delicacy is a tough sell in the age of oral sex on a school bus—isn’t it extremely strange that her own mommy and daddy would fail to think so? Apparently not. “There if they need us” they sit, the virtue-free, values optional, no-confidence, no-content, caretaker parents, offering nothing resembling parental guidance.

And these are the conscientious parents. At least they have a sneaking suspicion that, as Mme. Clavell put it in the old kiddie book, “something is not right.” Others haven’t a clue as to what right is. A few days before September 11, 2001, the stuff of a tabloid editor’s dreams came true when Robert Wien, a fifty-year-old Wall Street broker—senior managing director of a firm—and his forty-eight-year-old wife, Rochelle, were arrested at their home in Chappaqua, the tony town outside New York City that both Reader’s Digest and Senator Hillary Clinton call home. Neighbors had called police to complain about a noisy Labor Day weekend party at the Wien residence, an end-of-summer-training bash for the high school football team.27

It wasn’t the stereo system that got these two parents into trouble. It was the $345-per-hour stripper lying on her back on the patio interactively “performing” with whipped cream and sex toys for fifteen- to eighteen-year-old boys, a few girls, and the Wiens—Mr. and Mrs. Mom and Dad. “We couldn’t believe parents would allow this kind of thing to go on in front of a group of kids,” Det. Sgt. James Carroll told the local paper. He continued: “We always want parents to support and encourage their children’s endeavors, but there’s certainly a limit to what a parent should allow.”28

A limit, he says: such as, maybe, perhaps, licking refrigerated dairy toppings off a nude dancer’s breasts? Sounds reasonable—but not in this household. “Jeremy’s parents were right there, having a good time with us,” one football player told the New York Post. They were “right there” for the youngsters, but apparently that wasn’t enough. Or maybe it was too much. Det. Sgt. Carroll explained that the couple was arrested for child endangerment because “they were right there and aware it was going on” and did nothing to stop it. Maybe that makes the Wiens the perfect twenty-first-century parental chaperones: always there—but not all there.

The Journal News called the fact that Wien was also a “parental adviser” for the town’s Safe Rides program a “sad irony.” To be sure, everything associated with this story has a certain sadness to it, but there’s no irony in Rochelle Wien’s role with Safe Rides, a local volunteer service that provides transportation home for “stranded” (read: drunk or high) teens unable to drive home from a party—one of those “safe” “someplaces” in which today’s parents find “security,” no doubt. The program itself—with or without Rochelle Wien—is the perfect institutional expression of the modern-day parental voice of nonauthority that unquestioningly rationalizes adolescent vice, in this case teen substance abuse. Indeed, The Journal News did suggest that the Chappaqua stripper party, which also included alchohol and marijuana, might well be seen as an argument against the Safe Rides concept. That argument, wrote the paper, goes like this: Safe Rides “represents a kind of organized acceptance of teen-age alchohol abuse.” “Organized acceptance” means organized enablement, and “organized enablement” means organized encouragement.

They’re going to do it anyway, so let’s keep them “safe.” The youngsters at the Wien party were certainly “safe” as far as things went—safely lapping up the whipped cream the stripper sprayed on her body, safely inserting sex toys into her orifices. In their hostess, Rochelle “Safe Rides” Wien, they also had a “safe ride” home if the drugs and alchohol they imbibed at her home proved too much them. But how much protection—mental or physical—is there in being safe to do harmful things?

But maybe the Wiens should get one measly point for “being there,” after all. While this little bash was hardly the first or last time teens in Chappaqua, or any other leafy American suburb, partied with drugs, alchohol, or strippers, what drew public scorn and condemnation was that the Wiens, as parents, could stand by, do nothing, and fail to see there was anything to do. But what about the parents who don’t even stand by, do nothing, and fail to see there is anything to do?

The Wiens of Westchester were spared jail time after pleading guilty to the misdemeanor charge of endangering the welfare of a child, and sentenced to one year of probation and one hundred hours of community service. There were harsher consequences. As a result of this bona fide scandal, both parents lost their jobs—Robert Wien as senior managing director at Josephthal & Co., and Rochelle Wien as special-education teacher. (No word on whether her second job as a masseuse also suffered.) Insult to injury, the Safe Rides program dropped her from its roster of safe riders, and the couple also lost their membership at the Metropolis Country Club in Greenburgh.29 In a therapeutic age of vacuous values and flexible forgiveness, the Wiens hit the wall. Is that because there still exists a moral standard—an accepted level of aspirational virtue—in their community at large?

One of the most fascinating stories to emerge in the wake of the party was the fallout at the high school, one of those overbuilt dream campuses that is consistently rated among the top public high schools in the country. But for all the high-tech labs, manicured playing fields, and cutting-edge media equipment, there suddenly appeared to be something lacking: a common sense of right and wrong. The local paper fit the problem into a headline: “It Was Like Stripper Party Was ‘No Big Deal’: Principal Seeks Help of Community in Teaching Teens Ethics.”30

Lots of luck. On conducting an investigation into the incident, the principal determined that no members of the football team had used drugs or alchohol at the party; presumably non-team members who did so failed to rate administration attention. The administration also discovered that the team had hired and paid for the stripper.

[The principal] said she met with the football team last week and was surprised to find that the boys didn’t think they had done anything wrong. She said one player informed her that he was 18 and could do what he pleased. Another said that no one was hurt, so he couldn’t see any problem, she said. Yet another told her the stripper was just doing her job.31

And why not? Surely, Greeley’s brave new kids have learned that “wrong” is up to the individual, and that an eighteen-year-old has the personal autonomy to hire what their enlightened world might call a “sex worker” so long as they keep one commandment: Safety first.

With that attitude, Mason said school officials decided not to mete out swift punishment, such as the forfeiture of the squad’s first game last Friday night. Instead, she said the school would work with the players so they understand what went wrong.

“We’ve got to instill a basic moral compass, to show them what is good and what is not,” she said.32

Not that she was prepared to give them a punitive push in the right direction. In lieu of “swift punishment”—quaint words—the principal settled on a sentence of community service: namely, that team members design a community service program. Maybe this made the team members “feel good about themselves”—although this doesn’t seem to have been a group suffering from too little self-esteem. Still, it’s difficult to see how it would give them any sense of moral direction. Of course, where did the boys’ sense of moral disorientation come from in the first place? The answer is from the same sort of upper-middle-class parents who cluck-clucked at the stripper bust, blackballed the Wiens at the club, and, all too often, vacate the premises whenever Junior plans to party.

Or vice versa. That is, Junior may plan the party after his parents vacate the premises. That’s not good, either. If the story of “Chappaqua Chaperones Go Wild” tells us that “being there” isn’t necessarily the parental answer, neither are nowhere-to-be-seen moms and dads. Parental absenteeism was the problem in another notorious teen party that ended not in social scandal, but in the murder of a fifteen-year-old girl.

It was another rich-kid party, this time in the posh Westwood section of Los Angeles. The host was Howie Hendler, a sophomore at the private Milken Community High School. After he sent out an instant message (IM) saying his parents were going to Las Vegas for the weekend and he was throwing a party, about one hundred kids, many of whom were students at exclusive L.A. private schools, showed up at the Hendler home for the big bash. Before the night was over, Deanna Maran, a fifteen-year-old honor student at Santa Monica High School, had been stabbed in the heart by seventeen-year-old Katrina Sarkissian, a former student at tony Harvard-Westlake School. Rushed to a hospital by friends, Deanna died in an emergency room shortly after midnight.

The murder motive? Earlier in the evening, Deanna had chastised Katrina’s younger sister, fifteen-year-old Sabrina Bernstein, for carelessly breaking some flowerpots at the home where the unsupervised party was taking place. There was some shoving, and the younger sister telephoned her big sister, Katrina, to come to the party. “Katrina, a blonde who looked like a starlet, drove up in a black Jeep Cherokee and asked, ‘Who messed with my sister?’” reported Sara Davidson in O magazine. “Deanna stepped forward.” In the course of the “bitch fight” that followed, which was egged on by a ring of cheering teens, Katrina fatally stabbed Deanna. Katrina committed suicide the following day.33

There is much to be said about the importation of the gangland mores—prison slang, prison clothes, even violence—into the prep school circles of the most privileged stratum. Indeed, in the course of a recent murder trial in Virginia for the 2003 killing of seventeen-year-old Brenda Paz, a former member of the brutal Salvadoran gang, Mara Salvatrucha (aka MS-13), The Washington Post made note of this phenomenon. Court testimony, the paper reported, revealed striking similarities between young gang members and ordinary adolescents, so many of whom pass their significant waking hours at shopping malls, multiplexes, and arcades, cultivating the same styles and attitudes down to the same baggy clothes of jailhouse chic.34

Such behaviors seem to take hold in the absence of a civilizing, mature dynamic—adult influence, adult rules, adult confidence. To be sure, the Westwood party lacked adults period. But even in the aftermath of the tragedy—the point at which adults reentered the scene to restore a semblance of order, mainly by shuffling around guilt and blame—these adults were unable to fill the vacuum.

From the district attorney came a single misdemeanor battery charge against the murderer’s fifteen-year-old sister, Sabrina Bernstein, that resulted in a sentence of one hundred hours of community service and $100 in reparations. The murderer’s mother, Angelique Bernstein, settled out of court with the Maran family for $300,000, rather than face trial for failing to contain Katrina, who had a long and even violent history of mental problems; Angelique Bernstein simultaneously brought suit against the city of Los Angeles and three policemen for Katrina’s death by suicide. The Marans also brought suit—dismissed—against Shelley and Barbara Hendler, the Vegas-vacationing owners of the house where the fatal, underage party had gone off unsupervised.

The Hendlers didn’t know that 17-year-old Katrina Sarkissian would come to their home while they were vacationing in Las Vegas and stab Maran in the chest, [Santa Monica Superior Court Judge Linda] Lefkowitz found. They also didn’t know that their 19-year-old son, Scott Hendler, would have an unsupervised party where underaged teenagers were drinking alcohol, the ruling noted.35

In other words, given that the Hendlers had no “heightened foreseeability”—read: no crystal ball—they were off the hook, simultaneously setting a dangerous legal precedent for the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil parenting model. Who was to blame? The entire community recoiled not only from taking responsibility, but from even assigning responsibility. “This was our September 11,” one parent told a reporter, blaming “violence” for the crime. At a memorial service for Deanna, one of her teachers, Anoushka Franke, reportedly urged mourners not even to feel guilty. “No one here is responsible for our loss, and your guilt will only increase the tragedy.”36

Frankly, a little guilt—a lot of guilt—and some profoundly regretful second thoughts about adolescent social life might actually decrease the chances of the next tragedy. On the very night of the murder, Deanna’s mother, Harriet Maran, had begun to have second thoughts about her daughter’s night on the town, leaving a note on the fifteen-year-old’s pillow that said: “You are never going to leave again without telling me where you’re going and leaving a phone number.” As deeply concerned as she was, Mrs. Maran devised only mere containment strategies—a phone number, an address, a curfew—that wouldn’t have have saved poor Deanna from her fate in this tragic case. Only the kind of strict parenting that keeps a kid home on a Saturday night, or on a parentally vetted (and quite possibly boring) outing, would have given her a chance. The fact is, parents can’t count on other parents to “be there” to set the rules that keep children mainly “safe.” Such chaperoning is outmoded in twenty-first-century culture. In the end, even Deanna’s family looked elsewhere for answers to the senselessness of it all, eventually establishing the Deanna Maran Foundation for Non-Violence to teach “about the symptoms of violence, how to prevent escalation, and finally, how to stop it.”

It wasn’t poor “conflict resolution” skills that killed this girl. Deanna Maran died in a crime of idiotically misguided passion that erupted in a chaotic, adolescent milieu where a sharp warning about broken flowerpots became words to die for. On some important level, Deanna also died for trying to impose a sense of order lost in the absence of adults.

Writing in 1999 in Commentary magazine, Chester Finn, Jr., considered various trends in contemporary parenting, from aiding and abetting bad behaviors to the failure to shape good ones. Finn proposed that this de facto parental paralysis—the same syndrome that permits spring break madness to recur, organizes strip parties for minors, and sets teens free to roam into trouble—is an inherited cultural infirmity.

Heirs or alumni of the 1960s counterculture, they [parents] tend to be ambivalent about the exercise of authority, fearful of upsetting their children or of quashing their self-expression, eager at all costs to appear “supportive.” When faced with unsavory friends, or evidence of drugs or alcohol, they are reluctant to intervene, for did they not, too, “experiment” in their youth? This style of “passive parenting,” as Hymowitz calls it, comprises equal parts incompetence, feel-good psychology, and the remnants of 60’s ideology. The combination is deadly.37

Finn confines his main observations to the interplay among parents, children, and schools. At the same time, however, Finn, a former assistant secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, hones in on a colossal chink in the largely conservative argument against the spread of public education into domains once controlled by parents, churches, and neighborhoods: sex education, social services including drug counseling, and the teaching of ethics and politics now dominated by PC doctrine. Central to the conservative response has been the core conviction that parents should be setting more of the course of their children’s education and that the state should be setting less of it. But, as the title of Finn’s article asks, “Can Parents Be Trusted?”

At best, the answer is only sometimes—the dirty little secret of twenty-first-century life in America. Across the pond, in Great Britain, land of Oxford, Eton, and Hogwarts, the implications of parenting lapses have actually entered political discourse, with Prime Minister Tony Blair specifically calling on parents to lend their support to school disciplinary actions instead of taking their child’s side without question. “When I was younger, if a pupil was in trouble with their teacher, they were in trouble with their parents. It is not always the case today, but it should be,” he said.38 In 2005, Britain kicked off an unprecedented program to improve basic social standards in children attending the country’s twenty thousand elementary schools. The British Department of Education put school heads, or principals, on notice that schools should no longer assume that “the development of social and emotional skills is the responsibility of parents.”39 This prompted David Hart, leader of the National Association of Head Teachers, to say, “Once again, schools are being used to make good the deficiencies of parents. I think there’s a distinct danger that we are drifting more and more into the nanny state.” On the eve of his retirement, Hart went on to lambaste the irresponsibility of parents across the socioeconomic spectrum who have failed to instill either “basic social standards” in their children or respect for the authority of a teacher in the classroom.40

This isn’t to suggest that there aren’t legions of stalwart mothers and fathers, abroad and at home, successfully bringing up responsible, engaged, and decent citizens of tomorrow. But while Britain has brought this issue into the political open, we must rely on a range of anecdotal reports and headlines indicating a similar problem: that teachers may no longer depend on parental support regarding even modest academic and behavioral standards. In Wisconsin, a parent sues a school over a mandatory homework requirement for an honors math class. In North Carolina, a father asks a judge to overrrule a teacher who gave his daughter a bad grade. An Ohio teen sues her school district and eleven teachers for $6 million, also for bad grades.41,42,43

These particular suits were dismissed, but that’s not always the outcome. In Tennessee, parents complained that the public posting of the honor roll “embarasses” the kids “excluded” from the list—so, on the advice of school counsel, good-bye honor roll.44 Then there are the honor students “excluded” from being class valedictorian. Under parental pressure, some schools have abolished the distinction altogether, while others have simply distinguished more students. (In 2004, Soquel High School in Santa Cruz, California, graduated no fewer than eleven valedictorians.) In Arizona, a high school English teacher named Elizabeth Joice received a lawyer-letter the day before commencement exercises threatening suit if a student she had failed didn’t graduate with her class. “Joice said the student plagiarized work, failed a paper and did not attend makeup sessions,” reported Fox News. “School officials caved and the student was able to retake a test five hours before graduation and receive her diploma.” Then there was the Kansas biology teacher, Christine Pelton, who failed 28 out of her 118 students on a final project for plagiarism. Parental pressure drove the school board to decrease the students’ penalties and order the teacher to reduce the value of the project toward the final grade. Pelton refused. And Pelton resigned.45 All of which helps explain why the number of teachers buying liability insurance has jumped 25 percent between 2000 and 2005.46

Manners and conduct, too, are deconstructed by postmodern Mom and Dad. “For every parent who enthusiastically endorses school uniforms, there are many more who object to even the most rudimentary dress code, like the families in a posh New York suburb who protested collectively when a local middle school tried to ban tank tops,” Finn writes. Some parents in Modesto, California, even signed a student petition in 2005 against a high school dress code proposing an end to see-through clothing, among other sartorial distractions. Nor can teachers count on parents to help them enforce minimal discipline, either. In wealthy Scarsdale, New York, two hundred intoxicated high school students, including five later hospitalized with alchohol poisoning, showed up for the homecoming dance. After twenty-eight students were suspended, a few of their concerned parents called the school to complain, but not about the binge drinking that left kids as young as fourteen “vomiting, incoherent, or on the verge of passing out,” and not about the two families that hosted alchoholic pre-party festivities in their homes. They called to complain that “suspensions would mar their children’s college transcripts.” Principal John Klemme—a bona fide grown-up—held the line against the buck-passing parents, insisting, “There are consequences for what you do. That’s a hard lesson, but perhaps the more important lesson a child can learn.”47

But it’s the hardest lesson to learn from parents who teach that consequences can be changed—or possibly avenged. The day after a teenage girl was removed from a Maryland school bus for rowdy behavior, the girl’s mother blocked the bus’s path, spat at the driver, pulled an ice pick from her purse, and then plopped herself on the bus’s hood.48 In Connecticut, a father (and art teacher at a Catholic school), angered that his daughter was suspended from the softball team for missing a game to attend a prom, beat the coach with an aluminum bat. The father was charged with first-degree assault and later sentenced to five years probation.49 In Pennsylvania, a mother went to court to overturn her thirteen-year-old daughter’s expulsion for having performed oral sex on a thirteen-year-old classmate while on a school bus. The mother reportedly maintained the suspension was unfair because the school “was not clear in its written policies that oral sex on a bus was unacceptable behavior.” Case dismissed.50 In Montana, parents of two eleven-year-old boys who cut class one winter day and died of exposure and alchohol poisoning sued the local school district for $4 million for failing to safeguard the boys. Members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, the parents further claimed in their lawsuit that the district had discriminated against American Indians by “failing to properly select, train and implement Native American staff who are sensitive to the disability of alchoholism.”51 A jury found the school district not guilty. In Pennsylvania, the parents of a fourteen-year-old boy who allegedly solicited funds on the Internet to hire an assassin to murder his algebra teacher reportedly sued the school district to overturn Junior’s expulsion and seek monetary damages. The suit was dismissed twice.52 And in northern California, in 2004, the parents of a fifteen-year-old who allegedly planned a Columbine-style assault on his high school cafeteria reportedly filed suit seeking “millions” from the school district for failing to provide counseling.53

Whether such parenting is purely cretinous or baldly opportunistic, or whether Mom and Dad, in therapeutic parlance, just don’t have their priorities straight, it’s not surprising that schools find themselves trying to pick up some of the moral slack. (This is a problem in a culture in which even a small number of teachers have been unmasked as sexual predators.) Such efforts by the schools take us back, circularly, to the basic conservative complaint against the education system. “With more and more children arriving in the classroom in obvious need of a moral compass, teachers, counselors, and administrators have willy-nilly taken on more and more nonacademic duties, reaching into every corner of their students’ lives,” Chester Finn writes. And this is exactly the problem—“exactly what conservatives have pinpointed,” he adds. “Schools are no good at this sort of thing, and when they attempt it, they are apt to resort to politically correct fads of dubious merit, from AIDS prevention to training in self-esteem.”54

Schools aren’t alone in their attempts to fill all those empty parental shoes out there. We see legislatures across the country passing or considering bans on the sorts of minor behaviors and entertainments that were once quashed and controlled by reflexive parenting. No more. In addition to legal controls on the sale of cigarettes and alcohol, we now see legislation against body piercing for minors, bans on the sale or rentals to minors of sexually and violently explicit video games, even laws against junk food machines in school lunchrooms. We see schools devising dress codes that parents should be enforcing, and schools generating contracts with students to ensure minimal decorum on the dance floor. The lower house in the Texas legislature even approved a ban on “overtly sexually suggestive” cheerleading—the sort of moves that just the thought of Mom and Dad should chill.55 Following a surge of teen traffic fatalities in Maryland in 2004, state lawmakers began considering new laws requiring more supervised teen time behind the wheel, and restrictions on when and with whom teens may drive—exactly the sorts of conditions parents should impose, but don’t. As Patricia O’Neill, president of the Montgomery County Board of Education, told Bethesda Magazine, “Sometimes parents need laws to give them the moral backbone to do what’s right.”56

But shouldn’t parents—above all citizens—be the ones lending the moral backbone to the laws? Certainly, but they’re not doing it. This abject failure of moral will is one reason Power to the Parents is not the panacea we might traditionally expect it to be. The fact is, the parental backbone has joined the tailbone as an evolutionary remnant of what once was. Without such spinal support, no wonder it’s so difficult for them to hold up an effective safety net for the kids. And no wonder a nanny state increasingly tries to pick up the slack.

Pondering what conditions might ever bring despotism to American democracy, Tocqueville imagined an America that would have seemed downright science-fictional in the nineteenth century—a nation characterized, on the one hand, by an “innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls,” and, on the other, by the “immense, protective power” of the state. In the twenty-first century, however, it begins to sound quite familiar.

That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, fatherlike, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood. It likes to see the citizens enjoy themselves, provided that they think of nothing but enjoyment. It gladly works for their happiness but wants to be the sole agent and judge of it. It provides for their security, forsees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living?57

We may not have gotten all the way to Tocqueville’s nanny state—just give us time—but it’s within our sight. Maybe this is life’s revenge on the Baby Boom, the generation perpetually in revolt but never its own master. Then again, maybe it represents the triumph of Baby Boomers who long ago decided not to grow up. The question is, will we always have to live with the consequences of their success?