Teenagers want fidelity and a happy marriage. Celia Brayfield says they're making a plea for help.

Get married, have children and live happily ever after.

THE coolest kids in Europe share a single ambition: they want to get married, have children and live happily ever after. They know it means putting their children first, sticking with their spouses even if they fall out of love, and protecting their families from the evils of infidelity and materialistic culture. These are the babies who were thrown out with the bathwater in the days of sexual liberation and personal fulfilment. Most of them are the children of broken homes. Now they are fighting their way back to the family values which their parents rejected. This news comes from Hopes and Fears: Young European Opinion Leaders, the report of a new study from GfK, a British research team that set out to find the answer to the modern riddle: what will today's youth really, really want tomorrow? Poignantly, one of the clearest answers is that they want to have happy families. The pain of young people who felt abandoned while their parents claimed their rights to self-fulfilment echoed across every country in Europe. Even in the most liberal countries, there was condemnation for divorce, demands that parents should keep their marriage vows, and admiration for stable couples. The picture is of a generation traumatised by the "me-first" ethics of its parents. Today's teenagers are the tragic heirs of all the Eighties' ideologies that urged their parents to discover themselves, get their needs met, and find the love they wanted. This, our psychiatrists assured us, was the route to emotional health. We were taught that unselfishness was sick, but this lesson rested on the assumption that our children had no right to special consideration from their parents. Presumably these experts expected our kids to love, care for and educate themselves spontaneously.

"I'd have liked to have had a father,"

Greed, on the other hand, was good according to the official and popular wisdom of the Thatcher years. When Norman Tebbit made his recommendation that the unemployed should get on their bikes and look for work, I wonder if he realised that he was inviting those men to leave their families behind. Fathers were conspicuous by their absence in the lives of all the teenagers in the survey. "I'd have liked to have had a father," was the opinion of many respondents. In Britain, where half our runaway fathers do not bother to see their families, the Government is planning to create an Institute for Family Policy to slap an official plaster over children's emotional wounds. Among the middle classes, the quality of our children's lives has not been enhanced by the pressures on parents in high-stress professions. In the days when the concept of quality time first emerged, circa 1982, I remember seeing a TV producer on location dial home on her mobile phone to read her son a bedtime story. Around this time, two of my friends, a senior consultant and his wife, discovered that the retarded language of their youngest child was largely because their household was so hectic that there was no time for anyone to talk to him properly. Today I know parents who have no problem with their children getting through A levels on Prozac. It is sad that we need a market research survey to tell us that we have gone wrong. Quality time cannot be time-managed. Children cannot use windows in their parents' schedules. They need unconditional time in the same way that they need unconditional love. This study found a generation that had given up trying to get its parents' attention but was determined to do better by its own children. There was a passionate reaction against modern corporate culture which extracts maximum work from employees while disclaiming responsibility for their families and communities. Most of these young people, who vowed to put their families first, were themselves from broken homes. One English girl said she hardly knew anyone whose parents were still together, but although Britain has the least stable families in Europe, this trend was Continent-wide. "Almost everyone we talked to was not living in a traditional family," says one of the researchers. "Their non-traditional backgrounds had made them much more self-reliant, self-confident and outward looking," he says. This is not comfortable reading for the generation that invented youth culture, the baby-boomers born after the Second World War. The more thoughtful of us have been waiting for this ever since we stormed out of our homes shouting: "You just don't understand!" Now we find our own teenagers as scary as our own parents once found us because they are questioning our values and the moral pendulum is swinging back towards the traditions we overturned. We just don't understand. But, perhaps, if we discover how the findings were collected, enlightenment might begin. The researchers devised this survey after a study of 3,000 European teens raised more questions than it answered. So more than 500 of the coolest kids between the ages of 14 and 20 were identified by their peers and asked to take part in group discussions. The sessions took place in the coolest clubs in each town and were directed by specially trained moderators of whom the oldest was 24. Coolness is clearly a relative term in the new Europe. But what our children are saying is simply: "What about us?"