(Thanks Murph)

Teenagers and Parents: a Love Story -- By GINIA BELLAFANTE 
 

IN the new box office hit "What a Girl Wants," Amanda Bynes plays Daphne Reynolds, a 17-year-old who leaves the New York loft she shares with her wedding-singer mother to go to London and meet a guy. The guy is Henry, and not long afterward, they are buying records together, going on motorbike rides and removing their shoes in public places.

With her, Henry, a man who surely went barefoot only in the company of his podiatrist, opens up and becomes his best self. With Henry, Daphne gets the brass ring: a man who completes her. But unlike most coming-of-age stories, where the male lead serves as a bridge between the confines of a girl's family and the free republic of grown-up love, Henry happens to be the long-lost father she has crossed the ocean to meet. 

"What a Girl Wants" typifies a new wave in popular entertainment aimed at young people — one that elevates the bond between parents and their teenagers above all other attachments. According to its creators, the movie is intended not only for teenage and preteen girls, but also for adult women. Middle-aged mothers and their young daughters have been flocking to it, one age group drawn because the story follows the formula of romantic comedy (Henry is played by Mr. Bridget Jones, Colin Firth) and the other because it features the 17-year-old Ms. Bynes, a star of Nickelodeon television. As a father-daughter love story, though, one is left wondering: Whose fantasy is this? 

From the emergence of teenage movies in the 1950's — followed by teen-centric television shows — the genre has traditionally portrayed parents and children in separate, opposing orbits. Teenagers in movies like "Pretty in Pink" and "Say Anything," which were released in the 1980's, and even in the more recent "10 Things I Hate About You," would never be seen trading record albums, sandals or intimacies with their parents. Instead mothers and father were presented as cold, absent, constraining or incompetent — forces to be overcome and left behind in the child's transition to romantic alignments. Such fare was not designed to please multigenerational audiences; it spoke instead to the universally recognized anxieties of its specific 12-to-18-year-old viewers. 

"In all those movies, traditionally, parents were idiots," said Dr. Michael Brody, a child psychiatrist and chairman of the television and media committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. 

Meanwhile, in the real world of the past decade or so, young parents have been doing everything they can to avoid being diagnosed as the idiots their parents were. As baby boomers sanctified child-rearing, the idea that a parent would remain emotionally distant has come to seem not only anathema but dopily camp.

The result, pop-culturally speaking, is now manifesting itself in movies and television in which parents not only understand their children, but serve as their co-conspirators and strongest allies against the perils of
adolescence. 

In the WB series "The Gilmore Girls," Lorelai Gilmore is a clever, upper-middle-class mother in her mid-30's bringing up a reedy, Harvard-bound teenage daughter, Rory, on her own. Lorelai may drink too much coffee and subsist on a diet of junk food, but she is viscerally attuned to her child's needs and apprehensions. At one point she goes so far as to reprimand Rory's boyfriend when he fails to call on a night they were to have had a date. Lorelai is cool about it, too, deploying the locutions and demeanor of a 17-year-old. When she gives her daughter boy-advice, it is always the right advice and wittily packaged with references to people like Susan Faludi. 

For her candor and with-it-ness, Lorelai is rewarded with a daughter who is morally upright though hardly a stuffed shirt — a self-possessed girl of 18 who has thus far preserved her chastity. She is every grown-up's dream child, and the close bond between mother and daughter seems like wish fulfillment as much for young girls who watch the show as it does for adult women who comprise a significant share of its audience.

"The Gilmore Girls" is on Tuesday nights opposite another series, ABC's "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughters," which puts a similarly fantastic spin on the interactions between parents and teenagers. On the show, John Ritter plays a sportswriter who is in a kind of Tracy-Hepburn sparring partnership with his 16-year-old daughter. They bicker, but he soon seeks her counsel as to how to reingratiate himself with his poker group. 

On the screen, meanwhile,"What a Girl Wants" takes the rather unseemly idea of father-as-ideal partner to greater extremes. At the film's end, Henry, a member of Parliament, has relinquished his political career to spend more time with his family. (Through Daphne, Henry is reunited with her mother.) 

As it turns out, abandoned ambition has emerged as a regular element of the new teenage fare. Another WB series, "Everwood," stars Treat Williams as a widower who gives up his life as a wealthy Manhattan neurosurgeon to run a free clinic in Colorado and put his emotional energy into his teenage children. In "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter," Mr. Ritter's character stops covering out-of-town games altogether — in favor of a stay-at-home job as a columnist — when his wife returns to work.

On one level, such pop cultural product may speak to a collective longing among children to spend more time with their parents in a society where many children grow up in dual-career households. Parents, however well intentioned in the modern age, are still less and less available, Dr. Brody has observed. 

"I used to take comfort in the fact that parents would drive their kids to appointments with me and have that time in the car to talk to each other," he said. "Now parents are likely to be on their cellphones."

On an another level, the message that parents and children ought to be friends seems to serve only one segment of the audience. "It's possible to be able to share views and share a vision with one's teenagers, but often there's too much effort made in doing that," said Dr. Michael Schwartzman, a psychoanalyst with a specialty in child psychiatry. "And you have to ask, Are parents looking for a friendship in a child because they're feeling a lack of it in life?"

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