Saving The Children From Paris Hilton

June 27, 2008

Kay Hymowitz says strong families are the best antidote to a poisonous environment for children. Kerry Howley points out that widespread obsession over the 'toxic culture' is a byproduct of greater we.

Strong families vs. a toxic child-rearing culture
Point: Kay Hymowitz

What's wrong with kids today? It depends which kids you're talking about. By and large, America's middle-class kids are doing well enough. I could, and sometimes do, go on about their gangster-and-ho-influenced fashion sense, their gluttony, their binge drinking, their materialism and the fact that they can't find Iraq or hardly anyplace else on a map. But the numbers just don't support this-way-to-Gomorrah hand-wringing. Juvenile violence, drug use, sexual activity, smoking and pregnancy are all down considerably from a decade ago.

To be fair, the Gomorrahites are not wrong to worry. Growing up in the present media environment is like living downwind of a psychological Love Canal. It's hard to believe that a generation of kids whose imaginations have been shaped by the likes of "Grand Theft Auto," thong underwear for kindergartners, "Gossip Girls," Bratz dolls, Internet porn and that latest bit of airwave refuse, "Living Lohan," is not in deep, deep trouble, but there you go.

I think the toxicity of this environment partially explains the current bout of parenting mania -- sometimes called hyper-parenting or over-scheduling -- in middle-class communities. Do parents go overboard? No argument there. But parents are looking for -- and evidently finding -- a way to compensate for a culture that either ignores or actively undermines their children's socialization. In simpler and more cohesive societies, the culture supported individual parents in teaching kids the psychic and educational skills and the social norms they needed; villages really did raise children. Today, every family is an island. Parents have to guide their children through the sludge of television, the Internet, the dysfunctional parents of your kid's best friend, the incompetent math teacher and the empty neighborhood after school. It takes not a village, but a super-sized family planner.

This helps explain why low-income and working-class kids, whose parents do not do as well at countering a toxic culture for reasons economic, logistical and cultural, are not thriving. Low-income kids, especially boys, are dropping out of high school at alarming rates. In inner-city, rural poor and working-class communities such as Gloucester, Mass., the subject of our Monday exchange, teen pregnancy remains a problem. Now that a college education is necessary to make it to the middle class, the chances of kids in the lower-income quintiles moving up the social and economic ladder are looking dim.

Schools deserve a good deal of the blame for this state of affairs, but they will never be able to acculturate kids on their own. On Monday, Kerry, you pointed out that girls like those in Gloucester who get pregnant at 15 need aspirations outside motherhood. You're right. But they also need the psychic equipment to carry out their goals: motivation, self-control and the ability to take direction and plan ahead. These qualities are not natural to human beings; they have to be learned. If you have some way to accomplish this outside of strong, stable families, I'm all ears.

Kay Hymowitz is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. Her most recent book is "Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post Marital Age."

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The luxury of being worried
Counterpoint: Kerry Howley

Ah yes, the toxic culture. How do you measure the toxicity of American entertainment products? Certainly not in terms of juvenile crime statistics, pregnancy or drug use; as you say, all of those indicators point to a significant improvement in the quality of American adolescence. On average, kids are more conservative in their social habits than they were a decade ago. They're certainly fatter, but I don't think we can blame their expanding waistlines on "Living Lohan."

Thanks in no small part to the cultural plenitude that concerns many parents, the world grows more kid-friendly even as it grows more vulgar. For every Paris Hilton, there is a Hannah Montana. Along with the sordid materialism of "The Hills," cable television has brought us cloyingly wholesome, kid-friendly entertainment from channels such as Noggin, Sprout and Playhouse Disney. More kid-friendly music, books, games and entirely new modes of communication create new possibilities for kids to define themselves within the broader culture. Trendy clothes have never been cheaper, giving middle-class tweens the opportunity to experiment with self-expression in a way that only the trust-fund kids could a short time back.

Cultural proliferation has been especially beneficial to girls. My partner and I bought a Nintendo Wii last month, and as we were deciding on games, I was taken aback by the number of options with female protagonists. Growing up in the 1980s, I was forever helping Mario save poor little disempowered Princess Peach. In 2005, Princess Peach got her own game; now she's saving Mario and sharing shelf space with Aeon Flux and Kim Possible.

Helicopter parents abound, but I find it hard to believe that they're responding to the threat of Tila Tequila. Kids are more likely to wear bike helmets today, though not because bikes are more dangerous. Wealth engenders risk-aversion, and over-mothered kids are ultimately a sign that so much has been invested in them. Middle-class moral panic is worth criticizing because our attention is better focused on kids actually at risk -- victims of entrenched, cyclical poverty. But moral panic is also a luxury; like obesity, it's an unfortunate byproduct of relative prosperity.

What's the matter with kids today? I don't know, but I think I may know what's the matter with the rest of us. We're built to absorb culture when we're young. As the pace of change quickens, so does the speed at which the culture of our youth becomes the culture of the past. We lose touch with the dominant youth culture at record speeds. It's more difficult to keep up with popular music than it was even a decade ago, and much easier to retreat into cocoons of nostalgia and watch reruns of shows we used to love. From the nostalgia cocoon, just about everything looks unfamiliar and scary.

Still, it's not fair to resist the impulses of fogey-dom; childhood is no fun unless the last generation hates what you're doing. So let me just say: The newly updated Strawberry Shortcake is an abomination and an insult to all that is pure and good in the world. She's probably toxic too.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at Reason magazine.