The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups

by Leonard Sax

In the early 1990s, researchers in the United States launched an ambitious study of more than 20,000 American kids drawn from every part of the United States: urban and rural, Asian, Black, Latino, and White, affluent and low income, East Coast and West Coast and Midwestern and Southern, and so forth. They gathered data on the teenagers in 1994, when most of these kids were 12 to 14 years old, and then periodically through 2008.1 Researchers who have analyzed these data have found that the children of authoritative parents do better in school, are less likely to get drunk, and are less likely to engage in unsafe sexual practices—not only in their early teenage years but also in their 20s, compared to the children of parents who are less authoritative.2 They go on to have healthier, happier romantic relationships in young adulthood.3 As adults they have healthier babies, even after adjusting for demographic variables such as race, ethnicity, and household income.4