Working with gen Z colleagues has proved invaluable on the teen parenting front. “My 15-year-old called,” I tell the young people in the office. “She wants to have a teenage boy over while she is home alone. Shall I say yes?”
“Of course,” they reply. “She’s going to see him anyway, so it may as well be at home. And they’re just friends, stop assuming the worst.”
They are wise and almost always right. But when I ask them about the dangers of smoking, gen Z confuse me. One colleague, who is 20, tells me she regularly smoked with her parents from the age of 14. Yet her parents had a non-negotiable “no drugs” rule and she has never done any.
Others, whose parents had
