Redefining adulthood

- Helicopter parents follow the kneepad generation to college. Some become Black Hawks.

Sociologists and higher education officials say this generation is unlike any other, thanks to the child-rearing approach of their parents and the unprecedented influence of technology.

Many boomer parents carefully planned and fiercely protected their children, according to Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, by Neil Howe and William Strauss.

They saw their youngsters as "special," and they sheltered them. Parents outfitted their cars with Baby on Board stickers. They insisted their children wear bicycle helmets, knee pads and elbow guards. They scheduled children's every hour with organized extracurricular activities.

I like this thinking: "Kids do better when parents put their relationship first." If it's not true, it ought to be.

- "One of Britain's leading fertility doctors says teenage girls who get pregnant "behind the bike shed" are just obeying nature's law. . . . because females have been programmed by 2 million years of evolution to have babies in their late teens and early 20s, when fertility is at its peak."

Ah, yes. Our fate lies in our jeans?

- And then you have the Boomerangers: "A 2006 MonsterTrak survey found that 48 percent of students will return to their family home after graduation. Additionally, 44 percent of 2005 graduates were still living with their parents."

Life is hard when thousands of years of evolution have genetically programmed you to be an adult in your early teens, but a century of technological change has moved the economically efficient date for launching from nurture (r.e. the growing importance of education) into self-supporting adulthood.

There is of course the IUD. Then you could get married at 16, delay having a child, and live with your parents. Unless you have moral objections to some part of that.