Recently, I have been struck by a number of advertisements that revolve around slightly incompetent parents being advised by their much more savvy children. They are often advertisements for information technology, and the galling thing about them is that they reflect reality. Most children nowadays are fearless cyber-explorers. It is their birthright.
If the computer crashes or won't perform a function it was happy to carry out yesterday, kids don't panic. They mess around, trying this and that, and normally succeed in making the beast behave. Adults, on the other hand, have a healthy respect for the price tag of this temperamental piece of equipment, and are much more likely to be afraid of making things worse.
There was always a generation gap, but the gap is getting bigger. Take social networking websites. It was only one of the findings of the Barnardos survey released this week, but it was a very interesting one, that two-thirds of parents assume these websites are responsible for their content - ie that someone is in charge.
There are weak controls, such as reporting abuse, but anyone who has spent half an hour on these websites will tell you that the controls don't work. The websites provide lots of evidence that, while teenagers may be at home in cyberspace, they are alarmingly naive about it.
Despite the fact that they are constantly told not to reveal personal details, in a recent casual visit to Bebo, I came across addresses and even telephone numbers supplied by teenagers. Some teenagers keep their personal page private, that is, not accessible to random browsers, but most do not.
They obviously don't believe that anyone over the age of 30 visits these websites, because the photo albums alone are full of evidence that would keep some of these kids grounded until they could claim old-age pensions. So-called "knacker drinking", drinking at parties, drinking in friends' homes - all are cheerfully documented in living colour.
Then there are the poses. The images are the same from Donegal to Dingle. Perfectly ordinary, nice teenage girls pose with their best female friends, with tongues lasciviously aimed at each other. They are not lesbians, they are not slagging off lesbians, they are just posing in the half-ironic way that their culture dictates to them. It never seems to occur to them that these images are a paedophile's dream.
Then there is the language, and the highly sexualised content. I counted 17 swear words - oh, alright about four swear words repeated a lot - in about 150 words on one teenager's comment board. The girls seem vaguely more literate than the boys, who seem to have abandoned the English language entirely in favour of strangulated text language. That's the good news.
The bad news is that many girls have, after 40 odd years of feminism, internalised perfectly the idea that a girl's main role in life is to be hot, sexy and available. Their language, the way they dress and the images they choose to show on their websites reflect this understanding.
I work with young people on a daily basis, and believe that they are unfairly demonised. By and large, they are no worse and in some ways they are better than we were at their age. They are better able to communicate, and more comfortable with the expression of emotions and affection than people of a generation or two ago.
If they seem to routinely spend their time swimming in a raw, sexualised swamp, is it partly because adults feel overwhelmed and unable to influence their children's culture? The same Barnardos survey showed that adults are more comfortable setting down guidelines about drink than sexuality. Parents are still much more likely to talk to their girls about sex than their boys.
Only 37 per cent of parents have clear guidelines about sexuality. Interestingly, 62 per cent of parents feel that parents generally don't spend enough time with their kids, but 76 per cent believe they personally are spending enough time with their children.
Are we in danger of projecting our own difficulties on to others? Of course, most parents love their children and make constant sacrifices for them. Being a parent was never more difficult.
However, while young people may be naive about what they reveal of themselves online, adults are naive in that they have no idea, usually, what these websites are like. It is not as if it is difficult to find out. Anyone can set up a Bebo profile. You can leave most of the fields blank, although you do need to give an e-mail address for verification. It takes about five minutes.
There are powerful commercial forces that profit from corralling young people into virtual worlds inhabited only by their own age group. Young people have amazing amounts of disposable income, and shopping, especially for girls, is presented as the pinnacle of human cultural achievement. The brakes that parents put on become weaker if we are less aware of the worlds they inhabit.
There are, of course, issues of privacy. Initially, I was somewhat shocked by the number of parents in the Barnardos survey, especially mothers, who access their children's text messages. Most parents would be appalled if their children invaded their privacy in the same way. Yet when you consider that bullying is the number-one concern of parents, it becomes more understandable. It appears that parents who are worried about bullying or, say, drug-taking, consider checking their child's messages the lesser of two evils. Yet the same surveillance is not applied to the internet.
There is an argument that young people need a space to be themselves where adults cannot venture, where they can try various personas without too much damage. That might be a valid argument if the internet were in any sense private, but any page put up on the web is a highly public document, which could turn up in 10 years' time in the most damaging way.
If more parents ventured into this world of young people, it might be a salutary reminder that no one should put anything on a website that you would not like to see on the front page of a newspaper. It is a lesson that many of our young people have yet to learn, no matter how streetwise they appear.