`Thou Shalt Honor Thy Teen'

The average American teenager is a youth lost, adrift in a chaotic world of sex, drugs, ignorance, and indolence. To look at many American teens is to see creatures who have cast off the very idea of civility itself.

Disrespectful, rebellious, and a menace to themselves and others, the American teenager has become America's embarrassment before the world.

Perhaps we find it funny that many American teens are having more sex than their parents. And perhaps we have so given up on the idea of teenage boys respecting women that we don't bat an eyelash when we discover that 70 percent of all sexually active 14-year-old girls have had intercourse against their wills, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute.

But statistics aside, the best evidence of the how the American teenager has become a bewildered beast of the field is empirical. Go to any American public high school, look at how the teens dress and interact, and ask yourself if they were raised by parents in homes or by wolves in the woods?

The biggest factor in the decline of the American teen is abysmal parenting. Parents are at a loss as to how to even communicate with their teen sons and daughters. In their desperation they have taken an unexpected and radical step. They have now turned to the teens themselves for advice.

Welcome to a world turned upside down, with parents now looking to kids to find out how they ought to be parenting. When I first saw two young teen girls, Lara Fox and Hilary Frankel, on "Good Morning America" promoting their new book, "Breaking the Code: Two Teens Reveal The Secrets To Better Parent-Child Communication," I could scarcely believe my eyes. Was this for real? Are teenagers now writing parenting books? Are 16-year-olds the new Dr. Benjamin Spocks? Surely, I thought, this cannot be. Surely we understand that it is the younger generation that must follow the lead of the older, and not the reverse. Surely no one would take such books seriously.

Continued on page 1: »