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Best-selling author Michael Lewis has taken the world into high finance in “Liar’s Poker.” Into Silicon Valley in “The New New Thing.” Into pro sports in “Moneyball” and “The Blind Side.”

Now Lewis is sharing his own ambivalent adventures in fatherhood. He’s a father of three, and still not sure he’s figured it out.

Once upon a time, he says, there were clear expectations of what fathers were and weren’t — what they did and didn’t do. Now, says Lewis, nobody knows. We’re all just making it up.

This hour, On Point: Michael Lewis on American fatherhood now

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Michael Lewis joins us from Seattle. He’s author of “Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood.”  (You can read an excerpt at NPR.org.) He’s currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair (where he recently wrote on Iceland’s financial collapse) and a columnist for Bloomberg News.

A six-year-old boy proudly displays a dollar that he earned by selling found golf balls back to golfers at the course near his family's home near Seattle, Wash., in July 2008. (AP)

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It’s been a long time since the language and reality of hard times rained down on Americans like they’re raining down now.

It’s tough enough for adults to hear and take. But what about the kids? In families where jobs are lost. In homes where family budgets have gotten thin. In a society where high hopes are under fire and headlines are scary?

How are young Americans taking this economic crisis onboard? What are they asking, and being told? And will it shape them like the Great Depression shaped their grandparents’ generation?

This hour, On Point: American kids in the economic crisis.

You can join the conversation. How are your kids taking the crisis onboard? What are the questions in your house over lost jobs, tight budgets? How are you dealing with your kids’ hopes and fears in tough times?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Portland, Oregon, is Sue Shellenbarger, “Work & Family” columnist and senior writer for The Wall Street Journal. She wrote recently about how recession can shape a child’s future.

From Great Falls, Virginia, we’re joined by Neil Howe. Co-author with William Strauss of numerous books, including “Generations,” “13th Gen,” “The Fourth Turning,” and “Millennials Rising,” he’s a historian, economist, and demographer who thinks about generational change in America and long-term fiscal policy.

And with us in our studio is Marjorie Mitlin, a licensed social worker in private practice and a school adjustment counselor in the Sharon Public School System in Sharon, Mass.

And during today’s broadcast we heard from kids across the country. We’d like to give a special thanks to Youth Radio for producing the audio in today’s show, and to Youth Mic in New York for collaborating.

The April 3rd raid on the Yearning for Zion ranch in West Texas made big headlines. Texas authorities stormed the polygamist sect ranch, and scooped up more than 460 children after a caller claimed she was a 16-year-old girl being sexually abused there by a 49-year-old “spiritual husband.”

Officials soon announced that 31 of 53 girls scooped up were pregnant, had children, or both.

Now it emerges that the phone tip may have been a hoax, and some of those “girls” were actually adults. But Texas is standing firm.

This hour, On Point: inside the huge polygamy child abuse case in Texas.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Wade Goodwyn, Dallas-based correspondent for NPR who has been covering the story.

Laura Shockley, attorney representing several of the children taken from the polygamist sect in western Texas and now in state custody.

Mark Shurtleff, Attorney General of Utah since 2001.

Marci Hamilton, professor of law at the Yeshiva University’s Cardoza School of Law in New York and an expert on church and state issues.

William Damon is one of the world’s leading scholars on adolescence and human development. And when he looks around the world, he sees a growing problem.

It’s not just that young adults don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. It’s not simply that they won’t leave home. No, it’s that and more: A growing trend of rudderlessness or purposeselessness.

But don’t just throw your hands up and despair for America’s youth, Damon says. Answer the wake-up call.

This hour, On Point: It’s time to give the children a purpose.

-Jane Clayson

Guest:

William Damon, Director of the Stanford University’s Center on Adolescence and author of “The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life.”

A big sister’s nailpolish and eyeshadow. Mom’s high heels. Rites of passage–and good fun–for many young girls.

But these days, girls are digging deep into their piggybanks and hitting the malls. Glitter products, pedicures, mini-makeovers.

These tweens, as they’re called, are now spending $51 billion of their own pocket money. And marketers, sponsoring birthday parties and sleepovers, are eager to know what a girl wants — at age 10 and 8, even as young as 6.

This hour, On Point: When little girls become beauty consumers, and how young is too young.

-Jane Clayson

Guests:

Camille Sweeney, contributor to The New York Times, her article “Never Too Young for That First Pedicure” appeared on February 28.

Samantha Skey, senior vice president of strategic marketing at Alloy Media and Marketing in New York.

Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, professor of child development and education at Columbia University, and director of the National Center for Children and Families.

Joan Jacobs Brumberg, professor emerita at Cornell University and author of “The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls.”

One in five children in America today is a child of immigrants. And those numbers are only rising.

Yet as the immigration debate rages, the real lives of those children are too often invisible. Transplanted to a new country, they struggle to master a new language — and a new culture. Some will thrive in school. Others will drop out — or worse, end up in jail.

Now, two scholars argue that if these children don’t get the education and support they need, all Americans, not just immigrants, may pay a steep price.

Up next, On Point: Immigrant children and America’s future.

-Jane Clayson

Guests:

Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, professor of globalization and education and co-director of immigration studies at New York University, he’s co-author of “Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society.”

Carola Suarez-Orozco, co-author of “Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society,” she’s a professor of applied pyschology at New York University.

It’s not new but it’s truer than ever — more and more young American couples are waiting later and later to start a family and have their first baby.

Fifty-two percent of college graduate first-time mothers are now thirty or older — not just out of high school, not just out of college, but well into life and jobs and relationships and expectations.

Then come the kids. Like an earthquake — of course.

So what does it mean for budgets and dreams and lives and marriages to launch so late?

This hour, On Point: starting families after thirty — and what postponed parenthood means for American marriage.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.

Pamela Jordan, a professor in the department of Family and Child Nursing at the University of Washington, she is creator of the Becoming Parents Program.

Amelia Tyagi, co-author, with Elizabeth Warren, of “All Your Worth: The Life-Time Money Plan” and “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke.”

Julie Diop, On Point producer.

Every parent knows kids need a good night’s sleep to be at their best. And still, young Americans from elementary school age through high school, are sleeping significantly less today than they did thirty years ago.

With homework and TV and the Internet and video games and parents getting home later from work, it’s easy to kill another hour before bedtime.

But mounting research suggests that erosion of sleep time may be more costly than we imagined: in brain development, learning capacity, even in ADHD and obesity.

This hour, On Point: the kids are not in bed, and what that’s costing them.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Po Bronson, writer and social documentarian. He wrote the recent New York magazine cover story “Snooze or Lose.”

Dr. Judith Owens, director of the Pediatric Sleep Disorders Clinic at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.

Ric Dressen, Superintendent of Schools in Edina, Minnesota.