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Students and their parents have rock as their first musical choice. Leonardo da Vinci and Picasso are two names that unite parents and kids in the arts and Albert Einstein is the scientist they admire the most, followed by Sigmund Freud.

Francesco Neves

Brazilian parents and their teenager children are much more alike than you would assume. They wear the same clothes, cut their hair the same way, have the same fundamental beliefs, use the same slang and even enjoy the same music. Caetano Veloso in his fifties is the teen music idol he was for their parents. Some other musicians like Rita Lee and Gilberto Gil also draw the youth as they did 30 years ago. Director Alfred Hitchcock is another common favorite.

To believe new polls conducted among others by MTV, the conflict of generations has ended in Brazil and the gap between kids and their progenitors has disappeared. A study conducted by MTV Brazil with 2,425 youngsters revealed that children are staying longer with their parents, in many cases leaving only when they marry. A mere 18 percent of these youths say they are eager to leave the parental roof.

They have plenty of reasons to stay and no generational conflict is strong enough to dim the appeal of free housing, food and washed clothes. Besides, a large percentage of these boys and girls are allowed or even encouraged by parents to use their rooms to bring their sweethearts to spend the night and enjoy sex as they please. How is their relationship with their parents? Excellent and good, answered 90 percent of the wealthier kids.

Violence is the number one worry for these youngsters. The paternal house works as a shelter. Sixty four percent of them believe that walking in the streets is an open invitation to be assaulted and 74 percent don't trust the police and are even afraid of them. The today's youth wants distance from politics and are more conservative than their parents in areas like drugs, religion and marriage. A mere 15 percent are in favor of legalizing marijuana, while 69 percent believe in God and 70 percent want to get married.

Another study, this one by Rio's Centro Educacional da Lagoa, among 15 to 19 year-old students and their parents, revealed that both generations have rock as their first musical choice, that Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro and Antoine de Saint Exupéry's The Little Prince are among their favorite books, and that Leonardo da Vinci and Picasso are two names that unite parents and kids in the arts. Albert Einstein is the scientist they admire the most, followed by Sigmund Freud. In politics Kennedy is the common choice, even though nobody got more votes among the younger crowd than "no politician".

Among the differences between kids and parents is the fact that children are working much less than their father and mother did. While 34.2 percent of the parents worked when they were their kids' age, only 5.9 of the students are working today.

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