In my last couple of posts I asked whether there was a down side to being an older adoptive parent. As could be expected there were yays and there were nays. What there were none of were definitive answers. One of our more vocal readers...who disagrees with older parent adoption because of her personal experience as the child of an older parent...raised the point about the way that the generation gap between children and older parents affects the quality of the relationship.

As a clinical psychologist, I have to admit that I am often stunned by the level of ignorance that many parents display about the world that their children live in now. Even the ones who think they are so "with it." In my professional and my personal experience the worst offenders have been the ones who considered themselves hellraisers "in their day." Oh they smoked a lot of pot; they sneaked out of the house at night; they rolled their dad's car down the driveway and then picked up their friends and rode around in it before coming back home and pushing it back into the driveway; they popped a lot of pills; they slept around; flunked out of college; blah-blah, blah-blah.

Because of their (whooo) dark past they think that their antics of the 60's and 70's compares to the social scene that their children are negotiating. Ha! Let me tell you. It doesn't even hold a candle to the world of today's PRE-teenager, not to mention teenager or young adult.

I have a bit of a window into the real world of today's adolescents, but only a narrow view, because of the work that I do. I see a lot of juvenile offenders, not "wayward boys and girls"...but the ones you read about in the newspaper and hear about on television. The rapists. The murderers. The armed robbers. The carjackers. I also see a lot of children who are not criminals, but who are very similar to my hardcore clients in every other single way.

This stretches across race, gender, and class lines. Many of these kids party the same way. They listen to the same music. They wear the same clothes. The bizarre things that they consider normal, acceptable behavior, just boggles the adult mind. And just like many of my hardcore kids, the ones who are believed to be "just struggling" a little have many of their parents completely hoodwinked. Not completely by design, though there is some degree of deception involved, but largely by fact of...the generation gap.