Solomonster

(Not exactly scientifically rigorous, but interesting for those of us who think we know our kids...)

To figure out what teens are up to when their parents aren’t watching, we gave 53 boys and 47 girls from four Manhattan high schools (Dalton, La Guardia, Beacon, and MLK) a “purity test,” a series of 37 questions designed to tease out exactly how far they go. Then we went after 100 parents—not the parents of the kids we polled, but parents with kids in the same teen demographic. (We would have liked to administer a take-home purity test, but alas.) We found them—54 moms and 46 dads—in midtown, and put them to the test, with one difference: We asked them to guess their own teens’ answers. As you’ll see, the high schoolers and the parents live on fairly different planets.