Indeed. Any day now I expect a bombshell announcement from some prestigious university that most kids really would prefer that their parents stay together.

Science, of course, is rational, dispassionate and completely independent of human and societal constructs like values, fashion and funding sources. The fact that we are seeing more and more studies confirming conservative wisdom is just one of life's truly extraordinary coincidences.

Sit Rush Limbaugh down and talk to him like a Dutch uncle.

I think that most of our problems with delinquency could be solved by lowering the age of legal adulthood to 14. Throughout history, people were treated as adults once they could conceive children. We've extended adolescenct to ridiculous extremes. High school is basically a repeat of subjects taught in junior high. They should cram them together into an intensive 3 year course of study. Let them be eligible for full-time work at 14.

Robert:

There is a great deal to be said for that. The modern problem, though, is that we won't be so keen to let them marry and assume family responsibilities at that age. So, we have cast them into the full, self-supporting side of adulthood at 14 while not letting them drive until 18, drink until 21 or have sexual freedon until 35 (I have a teenage daughter).

Hoisted on our own petard, aren't we.

This ties in with our discussion earlier about, if we did double the human lifespan, what would we actually spend more time doing. If history is a guide, we'd have an even longer adolescense and senescence, and try to spend about the same amount of time working.

"There is a great deal to be said for that. The modern problem, though, is that we won't be so keen to let them marry and assume family responsibilities at that age."

How exactly would we stop them? And why should we? Why shouldn't 14 year old self-supporting adults marry and have families?

Ken:

Because we know full well they will almost certainly go through the anguish of failed marriages and divorce. What responsible, loving parent would sit by and watch that happen, especially to a young daughter/mother? This is 2003, not 1750.

Peter
I'd bring back the shotgun wedding as well. At least a legal substitute for it. We have made the cost of conceiving children exceedingly cheap for boys/men. Let's create a national genetic database of every man, woman and child. When every child is born, get a positive ID on the father from the database (assuming he won't identify himself). If he doesn't marry the mother, he will be tagged with the expense of raising and educating the child, including a college education, to be deducted from his current and future earnings. If he is already married to someone else, his wife will get a full report of the birth. Should cut down on prostitution as well.

Let me see if I understand. If they are home taking care of an infant (which is a 24/7 job), they are not out on the street raising hell.

For this we paid money?

What ever happened to the Golden Flesee Awards?

My wife and I had children quite young by today's
standards and it does seem to induce what we
would call "adulthood". Although it alienated
us from many of our same-age friends it somehow
seemed like parenthood and responsibility was
the natural order of things.

My general rule of thumb with parenting my own
children is that after around the age of 11 or
12 they can pretty much rise to the responsibilities you place in front of them.

On the other hand they can be as infantile as you
allow them to be!

Rush Limbaugh is pregnant?

What specific jobs are any of you proposing to give a 14-year-old? You being the employer.

(I recently discovered I can listen to Rush on my car radio. He sure isn't big on taking responsibility for his personal behavior, and he's way past 14.)

Burger flipper, grease monkey, retail clerk, you name it. Whatever they are doing part time now to pay for their $200 Nikes. For those who don't go on to college, the additional 4 years of schooling won't give them what OJT will. They can always go to night school to get a college degree or technical training. There is no reason that college has to come immediately after high school and before work. We are now in an environment where lifelong learning is essential anyhow, and real work experience will help them to make better decisions about what they would want to do in college, and they will be more serious students for having first hand experience of the work world.

I was about 13 when I wandered into the local bikeshop where we had just moved, and asked for a part I needed to fix my bike.

The guy that owned the shop was apparently impressed enough by my knowledge that he offered me a job on the spot. Saturdays, for the princely sum of $1/hr.

In so doing, he violated a good half-dozen labor laws.

I can't possibly thank him enough.

I started out lower than burger flipper. I cleaned the parking lot at the burger joint for 75 cents an hour.

And that taught me to . . . clean the parking lot.

Harry
It also taught you that parking-lot maintenance wasn't what you wanted to do with your life.

I almost dropped out of college from boredom. I worked a summer at the cabinet shop my dad worked at, as an unskilled laborer (due to union rules, I wasn't allowed to hammer a nail). I remember one 3 week stretch where all I did for 8 hours a day was to take wooden mouldings off an enormous pile and hand-sand them.

I stayed in college.

I already knew that. I was an entrepreneur until I was 16 and could get a paid job. 75 cents a hour beat what I could get mowing lawns, both gross and per hour.

I did learn how to beat rats to death with a snow shovel, but it's a skill I've never had occasion to use since.

So you learned to be an entrepeneur

Learned, later, to observe them. I don't much care for being one.