Wednesday, June 25, 2003

As I was driving in this morning, I heard this interview about a survey where teens rate adults on various categories. Apparently, we adults aren’t doing too well.

In its fifth year, the National Teen Report Card on Adults asks teenagers across the country to grade adults on everything from “being honest” to “protecting the environment.”

In some areas, the adults just do not seem to be getting the message: Their grade on listening and understanding slipped from a C last year.

“They don’t really listen to us,” said Charles Kuykendoll, a 14-year-old from Chicago who helped present the report card at a news conference Tuesday. “But maybe if they see it on the news, then they might.”

Since 1999, adults have not managed an A yet—the highest grade this year was a solitary B on providing education—and they have only inched up from an overall C to a C plus.

I don’t think so, and I don’t think that’s the problem, although teens may think we’ve forgotten now that we’re old. I think it’s that many adults (parents) don’t act like adults (parents) around teens. We want to be liked by them, so we let them get away with stuff that we wouldn’t have been allowed to get away with.

There’s a generation of parents out there who just won’t parent their kids. They want to be buddies with their kids, unlike the relationship they had with their own parents. And so we have kids who have rarely been disciplined or taught manners or expected to work for what they get.

I think this survey says that that method of parenting isn’t working. But that’s just my two cents.

LATER: Tony has some good points as well.