What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.

Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.

There is a tension between our desire to get our kids to turn out a particular way versus letting them develop to be their own person. If there were a pill that would make my child turn out the way I wanted, I'm not sure I'd take it.

You read a bunch of books and you get a bunch of how-tos, and you take a bunch of classes and you learn a bunch of techniques. You set yourself goals and benchmarks. I think people have imported that into their experience of taking care of children.

We're in a culture where everything is either consumption or production, so child care is either a very, very bad-paying form of work or a very expensive luxury that you purchase. There isn't a good place in our picture of the world for what caregiving is about. Even teenage babysitters have sort of disappeared from the scene.

Owning our past allows us to own our future.

On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.