News of the earthquake in Japan and the tsunami racing across the Pacific Ocean makes it hard to think of much else this morning. But a Washington Post review of the movie “The Kids Grow Up” raises questions about our highly observed younger generation and the ethics of posting cute kid videos on You Tube. At one point the mother of the girl profiled in “The Kids Grow Up” said to her husband, the girl’s father and a documentary filmmaker, “Just think, when she works through all this in therapy, she can bring the footage with her.”

I don’t write much about kids anymore; writing articles for parenting magazines and an anti-parenting-book parenting book cured me of that tendency. But this article brings it all back, the self-absorption, the child-absorption, the difficulty of raising kids these days. I’m glad I’m at the end of my child-rearing years, not the beginning.