Children of the ’70s

..."It has clearly influenced parenting. The people who grew up afraid to go in parks at night now supervise their own children with FANATICAL ATTENTION, even though crime rates have plummeted. It’s as if they’re responding to the sense of menace they felt while young, not the actual conditions of today." You speak of parenting today (vs the '70s) as a good thing, David. Yet you describe the parents of today in NYC as attending to their children with FANATICAL ATTENTION! Do you have any clue what this is doing to our children? I am betting not! What this helps create is entitled, hurried, and overscheduled children whose main job is to live their parents' unlived dreams! Fanatical attention, whatever its source, speaks of parental anxiety and over-focus, both VERY BAD for children! And you have no data to show that parental over-focus is the result of growing up scared!!! My other concern is that you quote John Poderetz as having written a "wonderful essay"--full of fear--about growing up in NYC in the 70s. To get it straight, Poderetz is the editor of "Commentary" and a neo-conservative leader. He was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, on the staff of GHW Bush, and on record as saying that George W. Bush was the first TRUE LEADER of the 21st century! Give us all a break, please! I think the big problem I have with you, David, is that you sound so reasonable, yet when I think about what you have said psychologically, it rings false. And when you quote--without definining about whom you are speaking--it takes only a quick check to find that you are talking about a far right-wing neo-conservative! Case closed!

It would help to spell the name recognizably. It is John Podhoretz. With that spelling he is well known to the literate.

Depend on Brooks to get things wrong in support of his prejudices. I remember.

His causal chain is fiction. He suffers from classical Orwellian "NewSpeak".

Now for the comments.

8% highlighted. All negative for Brooks.

He must have been sick for West Side Story.