Being 2, 13, or 40-something 1.1

A child growing up today is subjected to two-and-a-half as many media messages as a kid who grew up in the '60s, according to one of my former colleagues in the Department of Communication at Stanford. What the result of this unprecedented barrage will prove to be is anyone's guess. I know my young children are already cynical about advertisements, partly at their parents' urging, but also that they appreciate ads that are funny and especially creative.

One of the first things I noticed about the web generation of 20-somethings at HotWired when I went there in 1995, was how ad-focused they were. It was as if ads had influenced them much more than the news in traditional news media. I came to realize that new media on the web were as much a reaction to old media as our countercultural magazines had been in the '60s and '70s.

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Now that I have another child on the verge of becoming a teenager, I'm again acutely aware of how difficult it is when somebody you love completely starts to withdraw from you, however subtlety.

But to change subjects slightly for a moment, I felt utterly shocked last spring when my girlfriend told me we had to break up. "Haven't you noticed that I am not as drawn to have sex with you?" Actually, no, I had not noticed, which is one reason this hit me so hard. But maybe that is about how chemical our connection was -- an order of magnitude up or down really wouldn't have changed my perception that this was pretty close to as good as it gets between two people who are attracted to each other.

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Back to being a parent. When your child starts becoming a teenager, all of a sudden you may feel transported back to when (s)he was a "terrible two." The little being who just recently seemed so cuddly starts to rebel, and to differentiate himself/herself from dependence on you, the parent. If you are not careful, it can hurt, because it feels personal. But in reality it is a straight-out evolutionary necessity. Plus, you don't really lose your connection with your kid at this stage. They'll be back. But you have to endure a long, painful period of separation.

Maybe it's like that sometimes with adult love, too? After all, most 40-somethings seem to go through a midlife crisis of one sort of another. Maybe when it ends, they'll come back?

Or maybe not.


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