Suffer the little children: the grim "fun" of highly partisan kid lit.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

IT IS DAMNED tough to be a kid growing up in today's America. According to the Monitoring the Future Study, an ongoing survey of eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders, kids do fewer recreational (read: illegal) drugs, drink less booze, and smoke fewer cigarettes than their counterparts did 30 years ago. (It was not for nothing that last year's remake of the 1976 movie The Bad News Bears substituted nonalcoholic beer for the real thing in the movie's final celebratory scene.) Fewer of them are having sex, too, says the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (and in a world with less drugs, booze, and smokes, what little sex they are having must be diminished too). They start school earlier and go longer than ever before.

Perhaps most chillingly, scholars at the University of Michigan Survey Research Center have documented a stunning decline in unstructured, unorganized "free time," with kids losing a dozen hours a week of unfettered hang time since the late '70s. As any pint-sized Pete Rose could tell you, time in organized sports has doubled during the same period and, as a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette account grimly notes, "the amount of homework increased dramatically between 1981 and 1997.... The amount given to 6- to 8-year-olds tripled during that time." Suffer the little children (and, in this case at least, their parents)!

Forget for the moment that today's kids will live longer and richer lives (the bastards). And that they face a future overstuffed with options when it comes to education, work arrangements, and lifestyle choices. Childhood has in some serious way been stripped of its wonderful aimlessness, of shapeless, formless, and seemingly endless days and nights spent whiling away the time doing nothing that will help you get a Rhodes Scholarship or first-round venture capital for a start-up. Between the Baby Einstein DVDs and the Reader Rabbit computer games, between the increasing amount of obligatory "volunteer work" and the fast-becoming-mandatory SAT prep classes, kids are now effectively on the career track by the time they step out of Pampers.

Into the open-air prison that is contemporary childhood come two recent books--just in time, God help us all, for the midterm elections later this year--designed to root out and crush the last few remaining vestiges of carefree youth. Why Mommy Is a Democrat and Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! are misguided--and, one hopes, unread--attempts to politicize and indoctrinate tykes, to force...