By Heather Wilhelm - October 23, 2014

When it comes to public image, the millennial generation isn’t exactly knocking the cover off the ball. Just Google something like “Millennials are the worst” and you’ll see headlines labeling the 14-34 age demographic as “deluded narcissists,” “America’s worst generation,” and, somewhat hilariously, people whom Pizza Hut marketers apparently find “super boring.” The New York Times, meanwhile, recently took a higher road by couching its mild disdain in concern: “Can Millennials Stand a Chance in the Real World?”

Unfortunately, if you’ve been following the byzantine new “affirmative consent” regulations surrounding college sex, you might reasonably think the answer is a firm and resounding no. Enshrined as law in California and embraced by hundreds of American colleges, the new rules require a clear consent or “yes” for each stage of sexual involvement. If you fail to micromanage your amorous liaisons accordingly, you could be looking at a rape charge.

In a piece for this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine—“Hooking Up at an Affirmative-Consent Campus? It’s Complicated”—writer Emily Bazelon details the emerging sexual ethics struggle at Yale University. Unfortunately, at first glance, the problems at Yale could easily be mistaken for an elaborate prank.

Bazelon’s article opens with a university-sponsored workshop that challenged students to act out a scenario in which they were invited to a date at a frozen yogurt shop and did not want to go. A second scenario, rivaling the Potsdam Conference in its taut complexity and subtle tension, involves the dilemma of actually wanting to go on the frozen yogurt date but having to study instead. (Neither of these questions, to be fair, are addressed on the SAT.)

Melanie Boyd, an assistant dean of students at Yale, “wants students to realize that they should know how to recognize agreement, refusal, and ambiguity,” reports the Times. Ms. Boyd, who is employed by a school with a 6.3 percent acceptance rate, an average student SAT score in the 99th percentile, and a tuition of $59,800 a year, helpfully pointed out what you might have been thinking all along: “This is the skill set people hammer out as little kids.”

Unfortunately, it appears that thousands of college students across the nation still have some hammering to do. Freshman orientations now offer instruction on “mutual respect,” “how to break up without being a crazy person,” and “how to talk to real people without a screen.” How this does not embarrass everyone involved is beyond me. It also leads to one basic question: If you are a parent, and your college-aged child does not know these essential elements of human life, what have you been doing for the past 18 years?

A friend of mine who teaches at an affluent, competitive high school on Chicago’s North Shore says that many parents have simply checked out. “These kids act like they’re 23, but they have the emotional intelligence of a 12-year-old. They can hold doors open for people, but they can’t cope with even minimal conflict in their life. Their parents have made sure that they don’t feel any awkwardness, ever.” When it comes to things like SAT scores, he notes, parents are on top of it like Yogi Bear with a stolen picnic basket. When it comes to moral questions, they’re happy to let technology—like, say, the $600 phone with unlimited access to porn—take the lead.

In American culture, there are a few basic, commonly accepted commandments, and “Thou Shalt Not Judge Other Parents (Except When It Comes to the Issue of Breastfeeding)” is way up there in the pantheon. Well, buckle your seatbelts, amigos, because I’m about to open a big can of judge. If you forget to tell your teenager that drunken sex with a complete stranger is a bad idea, you are likely doing a bad job. If your child’s entire sense of morality and ethics is learned in the first week of freshman orientation, you might be failing as a parent. And if your 14-year-old—many apologies, as this one might be controversial—cannot make it through dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse without their iPad, you’ve probably earned those dirty looks from the waitress.

That last one may seem off-topic, but it’s true. For a child, dinner at a restaurant without constant entertainment teaches self-control, communication skills, and delayed gratification—all skills many privileged, sophisticated college students seem to lack. Social dysfunction is not created overnight, and parenting, it’s worth remembering, involves tiny little lessons taught over and over. That’s probably why it’s so exhausting.

No one, of course, is perfect. No parent can guarantee a flawless, mistake-free child. Incidentally, after writing this column, I fully expect my kids to wreak complete havoc at the next restaurant we go to. Drinks will be spilled. Beans will be stuck up nostrils. Farts will be released. Horrified glances will be shared. This is because God has a pretty good sense of humor.

But we’ll engage, and we’ll keep trying. With the bizarre crop of problems popping up on college campuses, more American parents might want to do the same.