Thirteen percent of teenagers, aged 12 to 17, answered that the Civil War was fought between the United States and Great Britain, and fourteen percent stated that the United States won their independence from France.

(Source:  Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in "Don't Know Much About History," Citizen, vol. 15, no. 10 [October 2001], p. 10.)

"'Kids are supposed to test the limits, you worry about it if they don't do that,' said Deborah M. Roffman, author of 'The Thinking Parents' Guide to Talking Sense about Sex.'  'But the message now is that there are no limits.'  '...The prevailing message is that sex is recreation, and there's nothing much to think about,' Ms. Roffman said. In some schools, though, students themselves have asked for dress codes. Several students in Millburn said they also thought the increasingly bare clothing was interfering with education. And so many parents objected to a J. C. Penney television ad that depicted a mother encouraging her daughter to sling her pants lower on her hips that the department store pulled it off the air."

(Source: Kate Zernike, "School Dress Codes vs. a Sea of Bare Flesh," The New York Times, September 11, 2001 [http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/11/education/11CODE.html?todaysheadlines].)

The young children of affluent parents have everything-including a nasty ear infection contracted at the day-care center where their parents drop them off every day.

To be sure, the offspring of the wealthy do enjoy a number of real health advantages over the children of less affluent parents, but in documenting these advantages, a team of Cornell scholars recently stumbled across a health problem reminiscent of the handicaps of rich young people to which playwright Thornton Wilder once referred as "the disadvantages of their advantages." 

Analyzing health and nutritional data collected between 1988 and 1994, the Cornell researchers established-as expected-that "food insufficiency disproportionately affects minority children and children living in single-parent families" and that "low-income children were significantly more likely than high-income children to be reported to be in fair or poor children."  The statistical tests employed by these researchers also yielded an unexpected finding: compared to the children of more affluent parents, "low-income children had fewer colds (in the younger group) and fewer lifetime ear infections." 

In trying to account for this "surprising" result, the authors of the new study suggest that "this disparity in colds and ear infections may be related to increased day-care participation and physician use (causing higher rates of diagnosis) among higher-income children." 

Childhood ear infections can cause long-term hearing loss.  So, when rich parents try to justify their decision to put their children in day-care rather than to care for them at home, their offspring may hear nothing but a meaningless buzz.

(Source: Katherine Alaimo et al.,  "Food Insufficiency, Family Income, and Health in US Preschool and School-Aged Children," American Journal of Public Health 91[2001]: 781-786; emphasis added.)