Age ten is the new fifteen, according to the Associated Press, which reports that teen rebellion and multiple body piercings have migrated all the way down to elementary school: "Some of them are going on 'dates' and talking on their own cell phones" in the fifth grade. "They listen to sexually charged pop music, play mature-rated video games, and spend time gossiping on MySpace."

As the mother of 12-year-old twins, a girl and a boy, I have heard of no dates. But the rest sounds about right, I'm afraid. "We've crossed a line -- we can no longer avoid it -- it's just so in our face," Diane Levin, a professor of human development and early childhood at Wheelock College in Boston, says of all the marketing of inappropriate toys and games to kids. She has written a book about the impact this is having, So Sexy So Soon: The Sexualization of Childhood. All I can say is, I cannot even imagine going up against the culture without the saints on my side.

My kids are not getting anything like the industrial- strength Catholic upbringing I had; they go to Sunday morning-religious education instead of to parochial school and have friends of other faiths and no faith. They question everything and wouldn't know a zucchetto from a zucchini. Even when we lived in Rome for a time when they were just starting school, they made jokes about how my idea of the most fun you could possibly have was poking around in some dark and musty old church.

It's true; I love hard-to-behead Santa Cecilia and her church in Trastevere beyond reason and can think of few better ways to spend an afternoon than alone with the dazzling medieval mosaics in Santa Prassede. Or with Bernini's Beata Lodovica Albertoni in San Francesco a Ripa, which is even more ecstatic than his Ecstasy of St. Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria. I dragged my family on so many such excursions that even my big-hearted son finally protested that we'd surely seen every church in Christendom. "What's next?" he once asked crossly. "Santa Maria dei Fagioli?" (Yes, that would be St. Mary of the Beans.)

Yet, here's a modern miracle for you: Catholic culture not only endures, but adheres, sometimes more than we know. A while back, I overheard a friend of my daughter's declaring that her role model was...Paris Hilton? I know I gasped, all sensors sounding as my eyes twirled around in their sockets. My daughter's response, however, was nothing of the kind. "Oh," she said mildly. "Mine is St. Clare; she took care of stray animals and founded the Poor Clares." (OK, I wouldn't swear to the accuracy of the pet-rescue part, which sounds more like Clare's buddy St. Francis.)

I'm not sure there is a political solution to the coarsening of the culture that every parent minds; we are the culture we consume. We set the limits as consumers just as we do as parents. Even if ten is the new fifteen, my biggest parenting challenges are still ahead of me, and I can only imperfectly shield my kids. But as I've been reminded, St. Clare can more than hold her own with Paris Hilton.