Sexually transmitted infections are at a record high. Again. One in ten young people is believed to have contracted chlamydia, a thought so alarming that an unprecedented change in procedure, announced this week, now means they can get antibiotics for it without troubling a doctor for a prescription.

Drastic? Not if you do the complicated maths that multiply the infertility that chlamydia causes by the number of randy little rotters who are expected to pass it on to more randy little rotters until, within barely decades, the existence of our species is threatened.

The trouble is, however compelling a case the sums make, they echo the compound arithmetic used a generation ago to “prove” that within five years everyone under 25 would be infected with herpes. The five years came and went. And they weren't.

As with clamydia and herpes, so with much else. We are in the grip of a public obsession with the lifestyle of our young that affects a bewildered unfamiliarity coupled with a prophecy of doom. This, they say, is the end of youth as we know it - yet the truth is the reverse: it is youth precisely as we knew it. In fact, it is hard to think of any apparently shocking story pertaining to the growing generation that does not have a direct corollary with the grown one.

Junk food, salt and obesity are spoken of in exactly the tones used on us for fizzy drinks, sugar and tooth rot. There were, we were darkly warned, council estates where all the 12-year-olds had false teeth! Needless risk and bravado have changed only in medium. Last week seaside police cautioned against the practice of “tombstoning”, whereby young bloods jump from great heights into shallow waters and spinal cords take the rap. Yet before I was 20 I had two friends risk similar injury by hurling themselves from cliffs aboard hang-gliders - and another who went the whole hog, launched himself in a hot-air balloon and, presumably having bumped into Amelia Earhart somewhere along the way, was never seen again.

At the more passive end of amusement there were and still are movies that exist chiefly for grown-ups to get upset about. Look at the fuss this week about Batman and the assumed effect upon unformed minds of blades, blood and violence. But wasn't it the same with the gruesome little Chuckie? And despite the direst of predictions that surrounded Clockwork Orange, there never was an epidemic of tramps being kicked to death in gutters.

“Influences”, of course, have always been the bane of adult life, involving as they do the notion of control beyond our own. Parents of very young girls are up in arms about a doll unsubtly known as Miss Bimbo, who is preposterously shaped and therefore bound to distort - not to mention sexualise - our babies. Yet wasn't the Barbie doll, 50 years old this year, also preposterously shaped?

Parents of older children fret about role models: Pete Doherty, for instance, or Amy Winehouse, seemingly conjoined in conspiracy to lure young loved ones to early graves - even though those same parents queued around the block to see Janis Joplin and lived to tell the tale.

Influence-by-media is an especially perennial target. Lad mags got it in the neck last week, when Michael Gove suggested that the ilk of Nuts and Zoo projected “a shallow approach towards women”. Or does anyone remember Playboy? Which would, in turn, create a generation of bad fathers. Quite a leap, that, but it is at least a variation from the favoured target of years ago, which was gals' mags.

My first job was on one of these, a charming if slight little weekly called Petticoat; still, we were responsible for everything ever wrong with teenage standards, thanks largely to our rather staid advice on matters of sex. Today such young women's magazines are not yet off the hook; last week a woman on Radio 4 spoke of their models applying “greater pressure than ever in history” upon girls to look thin and thus to starve themselves to death. Ever in history? Perhaps the indignant old darling might care to wonder why it was that Petticoat's favourite, most-used cover girl was nicknamed Twiggy.

Knives? Teddy boys carried them. Binge drinking? If you had seen my generation of squaddies at chuck-out time in Aldershot, you'd see scant change now. Drugs? In the 1970s there were an estimated three million people routinely breaking the law by smoking cannabis - and if the names of the substances have changed, their ingestion has not.

The sole meaningful difference between then and now is that the younger generation then knew what it was doing, admitted to it, even boasted about it. Now, when that generation has become the one in power, which gives it at least a chance of putting that experience to some use, it indulges in wilful amnesia instead.

The last generation with a genuine excuse for failing to understand its young was that of the Fifties and Sixties; before “teenagers” were invented and before we - yes, we - created the enduring explosions of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll. Which is why, instead of parents looking to the State to deal with the “problems” of youth, and the State looking helplessly back, both might do better to look into a mirror.

Then calm down; after all, the odd hot-air balloon notwithstanding, most of us got there in the end.

Times Recommends

• Bank charges hit us for being human
• Sorry, Father, thou still shalt not steal
• The shed where Santa’s failures go to die