America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

Friends seem to be like aspirin; we don't really know why they make a sick person feel better, but they do.

Before devising any blueprint that includes the assumption of Having It All, we need to ask ... Why do we need Everything?

It's smart to be friends with one's sex partner but dumb to have sex with one's friends.

Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet.

Boys don't make passes at female smart asses.

Much is made of the accelerating brutality of young people's crimes, but rarely does our concern for dangerous children translateinto concern for children in danger. We fail to make the connection between the use of force on children themselves, and violent antisocial behavior, or the connection between watching father batter mother and the child deducing a link between violence and masculinity.