“The children are not, for some reasonmay God please tell them what it isin good shape.”So wrote Midge Decter, essayist, book and magazine editor, “enlightened middle-class liberal,” and mother of three, in the February Atlantic. Her essay considered the ways these children (the generation that has just reached adulthood) fall short of their parents’ expectations, and argued that parental indulgence, naïveté, caprice, and moral insensitivity have contributed to the malaise. Herewith a sample of responses to Ms. Decter’s “open letter.”