…Baby boomers and their music rebelled against parents because they were parents ? nurturing, attentive, and overly present (as those teenagers often saw it) authority figures. Today?s teenagers and their music rebel against parents because they are not parents ? not nurturing, not attentive, and often not even there. This difference in generational experience may not lend itself to statistical measure, but it is as real as the platinum and gold records that continue to capture it. What those records show compared to yesteryear?s rock is emotional downward mobility. Surely if some of the current generation of teenagers and young adults had been better taken care of, then the likes of Kurt Cobain, Eminem, Tupac Shakur, and cer?tain other parental nightmares would have been mere footnotes to recent music history rather than rulers of it.

To step back from the emotional immediacy of those lyrics and to juxtapose the ascendance of such music alongside the long-standing sophisticated assaults on what is sardonically called ?family values? is to meditate on a larger irony. As today?s music stars and their raving fans likely do not know, many commentators and analysts have been rationalizing every aspect of the adult exodus from home ? sometimes celebrating it full throttle, as in the example of working motherhood ? longer than most of today?s singers and bands have been alive.

Nor do they show much sign of second thoughts. Representative sociologist Stephanie Coontz greeted the year 2004 with one more op-ed piece aimed at burying poor metaphorical Ozzie and Harriet for good. She reminded America again that “changes in marriage and family life” are here to stay and aren?t “necessarily a problem”; that what is euphemistically called “family diversity” is or ought to be cause for celebration. Many other scholars and observers ? to say nothing of much of polite adult society ? agree with Coontz. Throughout the contemporary nonfiction literature written of, by, and for educated adults, a thousand similar rationalizations about family “changes” bloom on.

Meanwhile, a small number of emotionally damaged former children, embraced and adored by millions of teenagers like them, rage on in every commercial medium available about the multiple damages of the disappearance of loving, protective, attentive adults ? and they reap a fortune for it. If this spectacle alone doesn’t tell us something about the ongoing emotional costs of parent-child separation on today?s outsize scale, it’s hard to see what could.

Policy Review: Eminem Is Right: 12/04
Too powerful not to quote. Instead of closing your mind, try reading the lyrics. Maybe you will find clues for how your kids feel about you and their world.