Families Without Peers

Kids & Parents Need to Know Their Places

When it comes to raising children, something has fundamentally shifted for the worse in the last thirty years or so. Talk to parents of tweens, teens, and twenty-somethings and you'll hear horror stories about intransigent, insolent, vulgar, out-of-control, self-absorbed kids. Even from the coolest, grooviest, most laid-back moms and dads, you'll catch whispers of "I never would have talked to my parents like that!"

So what happened?

The Problem of Peer Authority

According to Dr. Leonard Sax, a pediatrician and psychologist, modern parents are suffering from what he calls role confusion. What has become the new mantra of...