ABSTRACT
Complaints about the young are almost as old as human history. Even as far back as Homer, we can find warnings about the danger to society of declining morals in the young generation, and this topic has continued to crop up again and again across the centuries. 1 In the former Federal Republic of Germany, the last time this happened was as a reaction to the 1968 generation and its demands for a reorganization of society along antiauthoritarian lines. A countermovement arose, which tried to grapple excessive permissiveness by demanding that people rear their children properly. This simultaneously revealed the cause of the declining morals diagnosed in the following generation—namely, a deficit in appropriate “childrearing.” 2
