About those Hannah Montana tickets for 'tweens averaging $250 a pop (as much as a month's worth of one-hour private music lessons):
    What has gone haywire is the parental conception of proportion.  Between  the repressed "Children should be seen and not heard," and the indulged  "Children should be showered with fabulously expensive pop concert tickets," there is another way. But it is another way that has become lost to all too many adults of America's vast middle class today.
    They are hardly the first lost parental generation--although they are wealthiest and free-est with their money. But parental disorientation goes back at least a half century. On page 12 of The Death of the Grown-Up, I reprise some of Dwight MacDonald's observations on the subject--from 1958.Commenting on the brand-new genre of books for parents about teenagers, he said: "The list goes on and on, and it includes many titles that would have been puzzling even in fairly recent times, because their subject matter is not the duty of chidren toward their parents but precisely the opposite."
    This is the key shift of our age. Rather than raising children with a sense of duty toward their parents, we raise them to expect Hannah Montana tickets.
    The Washington Post story concludes this way:
    A few days before Hannah Montana tickets went on sale this month, Ellicott City resident Catherine Parks went shopping at Columbia Mall. In nearly every store, moms were buzzing about how to get special pre-sale ticket codes off the fan Web site and whether they'd have to resort to paying a scalper if they failed.
    Then she went down to the food court. While her daughter ate her Happy Meal, a woman at the next table flipped open her cellphone to plot her strategy. Parks felt panic set in.
    "I started to get freaked out," she said. " 'What am I going to do if I don't get these tickets?' "
    She ended up winning one of the codes on eBay and bought her tickets on the fan site before they went on sale to the general public. Her son and daughter, ages 9 and 3, will be ferried to the Hannah Montana concert in a rented stretch limousine.
    This is the death of the grown-up by skewed priorities. Page 12 again (me talking): Adults and parents have abdicated "their rights and privileges by deferring to the convenience and entertainment of their young. Rather suddenly [looking back to Dwight MacDonald's 1950s], adults were orbiting around their children, rather than the other way around."
    Needless to say, they haven't stopped.