"Over the years parents have become more active in creating the 'prom experience,' from personally signing for houses for a three day drug/sex/alcohol bash, to mothers making motel reservations for their sons and daughters for after prom get-togethers, to fathers signing the contract for Captain Jim's booze-cruise out of Huntington for an after prom adventure. We have become convinced that some parents support this type of activity, some tolerate it, prefer not to see it, or dismiss it as part of growing up. Some have expressed the view that it is better to lose one's virginity and get drunk before going to college, so that parents can be around to help.

...Aside from the bacchanalian aspects of the prom-alcohol/sex/drugs-there is a root problem for all this and it is affluence. Affluence changes people. Too much money is not good for the soul. Our young people have too much money. Sounds simple, but it is true. When Jesus said that it was very hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, it shocked his hearers and it still shocks us. Wealth is powerful, not only in terms of possessions, but in being possessed by it. Wealth changes personalities, priorities, principles. The prom has become the occasion of conspicuous consumption-from dress, to limousines, to entertainment.

...So, too, with the senior prom. We have come to the conclusion that it has a life of its own which is no longer commensurate with the goals of Christian education. And so we dropped sponsoring it."

"'Strike up the orchestra for Brother Kenneth Hoagland, principal of Kellenberg Memorial High School in Uniondale, N.Y.,' read an Oct. 23 editorial in The Chicago Tribune. 'Not because he has canceled the Long Island school's spring prom but because in doing so he provoked what should be local discussions nationwide about prom night activities and about parents and educators who don't do their jobs.'

...William J. Doherty, a professor of family studies at the University of Minnesota and author of 'Take Back Your Kids,' a study about overscheduled children, said in a phone interview that prom excesses like those cited by Brother Hoagland and Father Williams were typical of what he calls 'consumer-driven parenting.'

'We have parents heavily involved in orchestrating their children's experience because of this notion that experiences can be purchased,' Dr. Doherty said. In the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, he said, he knew of one mother who did not want her daughter to go on a senior class trip to Cancun, but would not forbid it. 'Her comment was 'how sad' it would be if her daughter was the only one at her lunch table to miss that experience.

'It's not that a whole generation of parents is crazy,' Dr. Doherty said. 'It's that there is a subset of parents who are crazy - and the rest don't want their kids to miss out.'"

A generation ago, parents did not explicitly discuss sexual matters with their children, but teens knew exactly where their parents stood, as in most cases faithfully married parents embodied the very behavior they expected of their teens. While the situation is reversed today, sociologist Mark Regnerus at the University of Texas finds that the more religious the parents, the more likely they don't fit the new pattern. Relative to less devout parents, religious parents may have fewer discussions with their teens, but when they do, they are more likely to communicate normative rather than informative messages about sexual relations.

Regnerus analyzed two nationally representative data sets of parents and teens: the first wave of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), using a working sample of nearly 12,000 parent-teen pairs who were interviewed in their homes in 1995 as well as 1996, and the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), a telephone survey of nearly 3,400 teens conducted between 2002 and 2003.

In the Add Health data, more than 47 percent of parents who attend church weekly reported talking "a great deal" with their teens about sexual morality, compared to 32 percent of parents who worship less frequently. The relationship was the reverse when the subject changed to birth control, over which church-going parents expressed greater unease than those who attend church less. Where 22 percent of church-going parents report never talking about birth control with their teens, 15 percent of parents who were less frequent church-goers reported the same. With each unit increase in parental church attendance, "the frequency of communication about sex and birth control dwindled."

These patterns held true-although to a lesser degree-in the NYST data, yet both data sets found that black Protestant church-going parents were an anomaly. More than any other grouping of parents, including the religiously unaffiliated, black Protestant parents appeared to talk the most with their teens-and with the greatest ease-about all sex-related topics.

Regnerus does not explore how any of these patterns relate to sexual behavior among teens. But given that other studies reveal that religious youth, relative to less religious youth, are less likely to engage in premarital relations-and that black youth, relative to white youth, are more likely to engage in premarital relations-his findings suggest that old-fashioned reticence may have its place, especially among parents concerned more with imparting values than passing on "just the facts."