This article , by Judith Warner, is definitely a must-read. Here's a taste:
"That’s no accident. After all, moral panics – particularly those concerning children – always serve some hidden purpose. “Modern ideas about the innocent child have long been projections of adult needs and frustrations,” Gary Cross, a professor of modern history at Penn State University, writes in his 2004 book, “The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture .” “In the final analysis, modern innocence has let adults evade the consequences of their own contradictory lives."
It reminds me of what one of my psychology professors said, that each older generation suspects the newer of being more crazy, and less morally grounded than themselves. It's an interesting pattern, and Warner's article is worth a gander.
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Anyone who has been through high school recently can tell you this. The days where only "nerds" graduated as virgins and everyone but the biggest "freaks" had a boyfriend/girlfriend at some point are long gone. I think this is partly due to the fact that a lot of adults don't realize how much high school has changed since they were in it, and they assume that because access to birth control and abortions is easier for us than it was in, say, the 1960s, that we must be having more sex than they were. But we're not. I never felt any social pressure for not having a boyfriend and being a virgin, at least not from my peers. All the stuff that made me feel inferior about that was coming from the popular media, not from my high school's culture. My high school was an academic magnet school and so a little unusual, but my friends who went to "normal" public schools have told me the same thing.
This reminds me a lot of this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/technology/internet/14cyberweb.html which is about how yet another perceived "threat" to children - the online predator threat - has been blown out of proportion. Again, what this article says is something I told my parents COUNTLESS times.
Adults want to feel as though teenagers are troubled and inferior, because it makes them feel more superior and secure. But honestly, today's teenagers are better-informed, more open-minded, and wiser than they ever have been. It's just hard for adults to swallow that sometimes, because it flies in the face of what they want to believe. But it's very true.
I don't know if this is really true. I went to two very small, rural high schools back in the '90s. Someone once called me "slut" to my face (that's what you were considered at my schools if you weren't one of the popular girls), to which I responded laughing that I was still a virgin. She was absolutely shocked that I would admit such a thing. And I saw that attitude a lot in my schools.
Morality has been declining since, well, forever. Even Socrates complained about declining morals among Athenian youth.
My pet theory is that morality is, indeed, always declining. However, every decline is counteracted by some improvement in some other aspect that the people doing the complaining don't notice (or care about). Therefore, whenever someone complains about moral decay, they're right - but, like an incompressible fluid, the total amount of morality doesn't change.