No Respect?

George Will's column in the current issue of Newsweek asks, "What are today's 'basement boys' doing down there? Perhaps watching Friends and Seinfeld reruns about a culture of extended youth utterly unlike the world of young adults in previous generations."  He looks at a new book by Penn State historian Gary Cross:

Permissive parenting, Cross says, made children less submissive, and the decline of deference coincided with the rise of consumer and media cultures celebrating the indefinite...