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Kids today... from a great piece by Joseph Epstein in today's Journal. Children, in America, now rule. Whether the vast attention currently paid to children will end in smarter, kinder, larger-souled adults we cannot yet know. For myself, I'm pleased not to have grown up under such full-court, adult supervision as kids today receive. From the age of 12 or so, more and more freedom to go my own way was what I wanted most -- and my parents gave it to me. After the age of 14, every decision about my education was my own: from what language to study in high school to what university to attend and what to study there. My parents paid the bills and, apart from an occasional well-meant but irrelevant homily from my father, got out of the way. I shall always love them for this. Waiting for my granddaughter's class to end, watching the New Trier students pass by, I wonder if they mightn't sense that, after all they have been given in the way of heavy attention, lessons in sports and culture, psychological counseling, SAT-coaching, love at the smothering level, they are soon to arrive at payback time. What if they don't get into one of the top schools? What if all the promise they were told they had seems to come to nothing? The pressure now is on them, poor privileged kids, and I don't envy them.

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