Children sense their solicitousness. The kind of lip discouraged and punished by parents in other eras is something middle-class parents now reward. While all children were once told, more or less, to know their place, only the less affluent—who lack power to begin with—are told to think this way today. Middle-class children, on the other hand, are told that they are fully empowered. In the long run, this attitude may or may not serve them well, because they then enter the world with the sense that no power structure is too formidable to defy or outmaneuver. But one thing is immediately clear:
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