THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT,

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT, according to James Glassman:

Extra! Extra! The big news of the past decade in America has been largely overlooked, and you’ll find it shocking. Young people have become aggressively normal.

Violence, drug use and teen sex have declined. Kids are becoming more conservative politically and socially. They want to get married and have large families. And, get this, they adore their parents.

The Mood of American Youth Survey found that more than 80 percent of teenagers report no family problems — up from about 40 percent a quarter-century ago. In another poll, two-thirds of daughters said they would “give Mom an ‘A.’

“In the history of polling, we’ve never seen tweens and teens get along with their parents this well,” says William Strauss, referring to kids born since 1982. Strauss is author, with Neil Howe, of “Millenials Rising: The Next Great Generation.”

In an article in the latest issue of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, Kay S. Hymowitz writes:

“Wave away the smoke of the Jackson family circus, Paris Hilton and the antics of San Francisco, and you can see how Americans have been self-correcting from a decades-long experiment with ‘alternative values.’ Slowly, almost imperceptibly during the 1990s, the culture began a lumbering, Titanic turn away from the iceberg.”

Adults are changing, but kids seem to have changed most — and they may comprise the new “greatest generation,” as Tom Brokaw called the World War II cohort. “What is emerging,” writes Hymowitz, “is a vital, optimistic, family-centered, entrepreneurial, and, yes, morally thoughtful, citizenry.”