I don’t like it when I see men dressed like boys, and women dressed like girls.  I have no problem with tennis shoes, or with shorts, or with baseball caps.  I just have a problem when, aside from the size and cost of the clothes, it’s hard to tell the difference between what a boy and a man are wearing.  The same for women who try to look like young things.  Even when she’s got the body for it, it’s just a little embarrassing.  Part of the problem here is that we so desperately want to look and act and be young.  We want to discover our inner child.  We wear shirts that say “Runs with scissors” and “Eats glue.”  We sit in great big Starbucks chairs with our shoes off and our legs Indian-style, like Kindergarteners on growth hormone.  I can’t stand it.  Those kinds of things are the subjects of this book, called The Death of the Grown-Up by Diana West.

The gist of it is this: In a now-vanished age, parents knew the difference between right and wrong and taught it to their children. For reasons that might have been fascinating to explore, the same generation that fought World War II, the Greatest Generation, rejected this role, raising children more interested in self-gratification and creating their own culture of music and clothes than in emulating their parents.

“The common compass of the past – the urge to grow up and into long pants; to be old enough to dance at the ball (amazingly enough, to the music adults danced to); to assume one’s rights and responsibilities – completely disappeared,” she writes.

West’s book makes some pretty big jumps from this idea to the destruction of Western Civilization, but it may be worth a skim in the bookstore.

Ms. West does know how to set the pulse racing. Along the way, we read of parents who hire strippers for their children’s parties, schools that have dropped honor rolls as too hurtful to students who do not make the list and a suburban mother outraged that her daughter has been suspended for giving oral sex to a classmate on the school bus. In court the mother argued that the school “was not clear in its written policies that oral sex on a bus was unacceptable behavior.”

Ah, it is quite nice to be a grown up.  Not always fun, but quite liberating.