His mother, Stacey Selden, is a New York City judge, and his father, Jeff Liebenson, is an entertainment lawyer. They are of an age and culture to remember when musicians like Robert Plant (or even Kurt Cobain) were the heroes of teenage boys. And they bemusedly admire Peter’s company, which he started last summer. “How did he know how?” his mother wondered.

“I thought maybe he’d do an internship,” Mr. Liebenson said, “but Peter had this very clear idea.” He took a two-day course in Web design at the School of Visual Arts, where he learned all sorts of nifty things (like how to make a photo of a caramel wiggle on a Web page), sent a batch of caramels to his favorite candy blog, candyaddict.com, garnering a glowing testimonial (“I predict sweet success for you!”) as well as a link to his site — and a business was born.

With an ear for buzz phrases like “no trans fats,” Peter promises customers a product that is both healthy and delicious. Delivery may take up to a month (homework and college applications come first), but you can request samples for $1 and pay online through PayPal. If you send Peter a testimonial, he will refund your dollar.

With an Internet storefront, reviews on blogs and testimonials from customers, Peter has more orders than he can keep up with (from 22 states and as far away as the Netherlands, he said). Expenses are low (he pays $4 a month for Web hosting and his advertising came free). He estimates a total profit to date of about $45, after allowing for operating costs (a domain name, postage, packaging) and supplies (a candy thermometer, butter, cream, sugar and mixing spoons), a figure that took some time to arrive at (he sifted through receipts the other night), suggesting that Peter’s impulses are more creative than acquisitive.

Not all teenage entrepreneurs are so process-oriented. For many, the profit is the turn-on. Even parents can be tickled, if slightly abashed, by their child’s moneymaking skills. One Palm Beach mother of a student at a New England boarding school reported buying cases of Red Bull at a Costco one parents’ weekend, which her son sold for triple the cost to his dorm mates. “They like to ski on the stuff,” she said, begging anonymity. “I also sent him 20 or so used movies which he rents from his room.”

Boarding schools, of course, are fertile environments for under-age business types; the market is quite literally captive and therefore hungry for all manner of goods. In decades past you could spot the future captains of industry by their triple beam scales and twitching fingers. Now the drug dealers have been trumped by more legal monopolists. Two years ago Matt Swift was a junior at the Salisbury School for boys in Salisbury, Conn. He wasn’t that athletic, he said, and had a lot of free time. He had always been entrepreneurial, selling water to his ski teammates on their Friday bus trips in grade school and looking up to his “life mentor,” Sheridan Snyder, a biotech entrepreneur (and his mother’s partner).

Image HOMEWORK Paul McCauley encourages his daughters, Kelsey, 13, left, and Karly, 11, in their interest in business. The girls blog about the board game Cashflow and invite friends to play it in their Phoenix home. Credit... Laura Segall for The New York Times

Mr. Swift, now a freshman at Georgetown University, described his business plan: “We were in the middle of nowhere and the food was terrible and we thought, what’s the best market for a boys’ school?”