It’s all the kids fault. They’re fighting on buses, they’re beating up teachers in schools, they’re staying out too late and to top it off, they’re in the library snooping for pornography on the Internet.

Well, don’t worry. The nannies at City Hall are hard at work, making sure Boston’s kids stay in line. Over the last few months, we have seen the Mayor and the City Council earnestly suggesting ways to clamp down on those crazy kids. A few City Councilors have proposed citywide curfews for all children. The entire Council has spent its last several meetings railing on about kids’ misbehavior on school buses, vowing to put police cadets on each and every single bus. Just last week, the Council made headlines when it considered a proposal to kick delinquent kids out of schools and send them to jail for their education (meaning, presumably, that they would emerge with several advanced degrees in pick pocketing, pharmacology and small arms concealment).

Meanwhile, the Mayor has provoked a storm of controversy by installing censors on Internet web sites that will filter out all sexually oriented material. Not only will the triple XXX sites be banned, but so will those dealing with breast cancer, sexual education and the photographs of Herb Ritts. I’m told that requests for the National Geographic issues on people from primitive tribes have skyrocketed as a result of the ban.

One could spend hours tearing apart each of these ideas, but there is a common theme to them, a sense that our kids are out of control. There is also a sense that somehow government should be the vehicle by which we seize back that control.

I think we’re wrong. Most kids aren’t out of control. Most are well meaning but often confused adolescents who are struggling with the process of growing up. It’s not easy making the transition from child to adult. Kids struggle with the notion of moving from dependents to independents. They struggle with the notion of their parents no longer being infallible gods but instead flawed humans much like themselves. They struggle with new ideas and new feelings, particularly in their developing sense of themselves as sexual beings. They struggle with a desire to be something when they grow up and to right the wrongs they see around them.

It’s been happening for a long time. When we saw it happening during the 1960s, we called it the “Generation Gap,” and treated our children as aliens, with a culture, world and mindset all their own. We told them that their music was noise, that their dreams were crazy and that they should be grateful for what they have.

And now that those kids from the ‘60s are grown up, they have become caricatures of their parents. They seem to have forgotten what they once were. No deviation is tolerated, no mistakes are permitted. The Mayor and many on the City Council would disagree. “No,” they argue, “We just want our kids to be safe.” Not really. What we really want is for them to be in a cocoon, removed from the world.

The impulse is understandable, as every parent who has ever panicked when his or her child walks ahead to a street curb knows well. But as parents our obligation is to help our children cross those curbs. We try to teach them how to do it, but ultimately they will have to cross by themselves, alone, perhaps without us even knowing they are doing so.

So it is with government. We can’t control our citizens, even our young citizens. Our role is to act as guides to the adult world, not as impediments.