Whose crisis is this, anyway?

The answer is affirmative. Describing times of rapid cultural flux, Ehrensaft posits that there have been dominant directives about raising children for many decades, from habit training in the 1930s to the more permissive approaches of Benjamin Spock in the 1940s and 1950s. No clear directives exist today. Limited time for "parenting," overburdened two-income parents with fragile emotional ties, fear for our children's future and a generation of "Peter Pan" parents are some of the factors that contribute to today's "crisis in parenthood."

"Consumed by their own stress and worries, feeling more afraid, alone, and professionally insecure than parents in the past, mothers and fathers attempt to bolster their own self-esteem by having precocious and high-achieving sons and daughters," writes Ehrensaft. This confluence of stress and insecurities has created a sort of freakish adult-child, perhaps best typified by Jessica Dubroll, the cheerfully officious 7-year-old who lost her life while attempting to fly solo across the country.

As the trend toward being more grown-up starts at a younger age, a curious parenting permutation has emerged. Children are both pushed to progress and overcoddled, not by parents who are selfish or uncaring but, as Ehrensaft points out, "by confused parents who have no clear picture of what a child is and are unconscious of the vacillations between hurrying our children and holding them back. As a result, childhood is simultaneously contracting and expanding in some bizarre fashion."

Equally bizarre is the phenomenon in which parents who push their children to grow up fast are often the same Peter Pan parents who never really wanted to grow up themselves, and thus have a paradoxically well-intentioned but myopic view of parenting that fetishizes, glorifies and commodifies childhood. Parenthood, which comes as a shock, becomes a high-investment, high-risk endeavor instead of a natural, evolving developmental process.

The best specialty schools function with a high awareness of dysfunctional parental dynamics and require parents to participate in a series of increasingly complex personal development programs for the duration of their child's enrollment. Says Katie Brown, a CEDU alumni, "Parental involvement is crucial. Lots of parents send kids off to be fixed. These kids aren't necessarily broken, but the parents are."

Says Clif Drummond, who sent his son Dylan to CEDU when problems stemming from Dylan's alcoholism got out of control: "You're told that 90 percent of your kid's success depends on what you do. You say, 'Hey, I'm paying you guys 50 grand a year and you're telling me that 90 percent of the work is about us?' And they say, 'Yes.'"

As for Dylan, he didn't particularly enjoy CEDU at first ("My attitude toward everyone that first year was basically 'Fuck off and die,'" he says), but he credits it with saving his life and attributes his parents' work on themselves as an essential and crucial part of the process. "I was suspicious at first," he says. "I never saw them being vulnerable, but over time I saw that this was for real. They were trying to share old, deep pain.

"It was the first time I was really touched by my parents -- with them doing something for themselves with no burdens or expectations on me. That's when I began to get over my anger and work actively on trying to heal, trying to mend our relationship."

So are teens truly more defiant and troubled than ever before? Or are we experiencing a sort of cultural dij` vu that harks back to the '50s, when the sexually and morally "degenerate" influences of rock 'n' roll, among other things, set off waves of parental panic throughout the nation?

"Absolutely," says Ponton. "There are a number of parallels here." The first similarity is statistical: There was a big boom in the teen population during the '50s. Beyond that, there is a remarkable replay of old perceptions that the parents of today's teens once rejected as irrational and unfair.

"These things are definitely culture based. Teens are once again perceived as risk takers, as dangerous," says Ponton. "When society is doing well economically -- as was also the case in the '50s -- people tend to dump on teens. You'd think economically good times would be good for teens, but they're not."

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