Where are the Adults??

My recent reading of I am Charlotte Simmons, and the memories it raised of my own college experience, have had me wondering what ever happened to the notion of mature adults setting limits and expectations for children and young adults.

It seems the world now is awash in parents and "adults" in positions of authority who believe it's more important to be seen as "cool" by their charges than actually to protect them. The concept of in loco parentis was long ago jettisoned by the adolescents of all ages who run our universities. And we read stories such as this week's news about the mother who held booze, drug, and sex parties for her teenage son and his friends.

Sadder still is this story. A young woman died a year ago on a cheerleading trip to Hawaii when she broke her 2 am curfew to spend the night with a young man she'd met upon arriving at her resort hotel the day before. We'll never know why Laura Crossan fell from the ninth-floor balcony of her new "boyfriend's" room, but this is a far cry from "Leave it to Beaver," isn't it?

Accidents happen, and some young people will die for seemingly unfathomable reasons. But the whole idea of adult authority is to substitute what should be a more mature judgment for that of youthful indiscretion and inexperience, therefore to reduce the chances for avoidable tragedy. Our culture's worship of youth as not only physically beautiful, which it often is, but also intellectually advanced (note the tautological storyline of seemingly every TV show that adults are ignorant and stupid boobs and youngsters are brilliant savants), which it almost always is not, is a recipe for disaster -- especially when combined with the effete "adults" that our abandonment of real adulthood back in the '60s has now created.