Without mentors, teens can slip up

IT'S NOT VERY often that I get to go out to dinner with both of my daughters. I'm happy as we sit in the booth at Sammy T's--until they both start busily texting their friends and not listening to their dad's pearls of wisdom.

Are they products of the 'lack of apprenticeship for adulthood' that has supposedly undermined our children's development, I wonder? 

They're both recent college graduates and usually fairly attentive. But according to Judy Diero, a rehabilitation specialist at Western Washington University, young people have shown deterioration in such things as discipline, achievement, motivation, crime, pregnancy, drug use and suicide--all due to a significant shift in U.S. culture that has separated young people from the wisdom of their elders.