It's rather distressing, since I know how self-destructive such tendecies can be (I used to have some myself, and do my best to avoid them - which also explains my stressing responsibility to him). It's also worrisome for him to have picked up such tendecies... since he's only eight.

Or am I looking at this wrong? As I'm writing this, I remember Bill Keane's _Family Circus_ strips featuring "Not Me" and what I can remember of my own long-ago childhood - and this was normal, even expected behavior.

So it occurrs to me; maybe we're not looking at something that society (culture, school, music, television, what have you) is adding to people today... but rather, a lack of something. A lack of growing up, of viewing themselves as adults, rather than large children.

At the risk of *really* rambling (rather than the short ramble so far), I'm further reminded of Joseph Campbell, and the rituals of older civilizations - the rites that marked one's passage from childhood to adulthood... and how far we've moved away from them. The passage is muddled - with young children dressing (and being dressed) as adults and experiencing adult pressures, with the legal line between adulthood and childhood blurred by the five-year range in assumption of "adult" responsibilities (driving through drinking - and we won't *even* mention the huge range for "consent to marry" ages).

Maybe by having children grow up too fast, they're not able to grow up enough.