With all the curfews, dress codes and other restrictions being imposed on kids, are we raising a generation of upstanding citizens--or future leaders of a police state?

For Nicole Eklund, a 16-year-old cheerleader from Simi Valley, coming of age has meant getting used to police dogs sniffing for drugs at her school locker, dress codes proscribing bare midriffs, and an official 10 p.m. curfew seven days a week.

Leaders in her community--a suburb so benign she calls it “Anytown, USA”--have expelled a kindergartner for bringing a pink squirt gun to school and are considering, as state legislators plan to, a daytime curfew for people under age 18.

What’s more, living in California, she now is subject to a $75 fine and community service if she ever smokes a cigarette, even if her parents give it to her. Friends applying for their first driver’s licenses this year likely will be restricted from driving late at night or with other kids. Those who engage in vandalism or graffiti may not be able to obtain licenses at all and may have to stay home looking at blank TV screens--if their parents can program a V-chip.

In Nicole’s opinion, some of these efforts miss the mark. She thinks adults should be preparing their children for the real world instead of overprotecting them. “People learn by experience and mistakes,” Nicole says.

Nevertheless, emboldened by First Baby Boomer Bill Clinton--who has endorsed daytime curfews, smoking bans and school uniforms--adults across the country are experimenting with unprecedented controls in an effort to both protect and punish the young, especially teenagers.

Only a few years ago, it was fashionable to talk about children’s rights, one of Hillary Clinton’s original passions. “We’re not talking about children’s rights today,” says William Strauss, a political commentator in Washington, D.C. “We’re talking about the right of the principal to probe into their lockers and the duty of the child not to put anything in that locker.”

High courts already have ruled that some efforts have gone too far in restricting liberties, but in general the controls are being met with open arms.

“The thing that’s remarkable is that there’s no single ideological group you can point the finger at for this renaissance of enthusiasm for authority,” says UC Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring, whose book on juvenile crime will be published this year. “It’s a little bit ‘the New Democrats have discovered family values,’ a little bit ‘the terror of youth violence’ and a little bit of people now interested in making laws for other people’s kids.”

“The public perception is that it isn’t like it used to be, that kids are doing more and more bad things at a younger and younger age, and the things they are doing are worse than ever before,” adds professor Thomas Nazario of San Francisco, a specialist in children’s law. “It is worse,” Nazario believes. “The only question is how much worse.”

Zimring disagrees. He contends that fear of youth violence--often the genesis of curfews and dress codes--has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most of the “increase” in youth violence since the mid-1980s, Zimring says, can be attributed to a reclassification of minor attacks as more serious ones. While still disturbing, even those figures have been declining in recent years.

However, in a recent survey of American cities, many officials attributed dramatic decreases in juvenile crime precisely to an increase in restrictions on children, namely daytime and nighttime curfews.

An estimated 35 regional jurisdictions, including the city and county of Los Angeles, have daytime curfews, also known as anti-truancy laws, requiring children to stay off the streets during school hours. The majority of schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District have implemented policies requiring students to wear uniforms. New laws, rules and policies are gaining steam almost everywhere.

* In Long Beach, parents’ enthusiasm for school uniforms, required at every elementary and middle school for the past three years, spread this fall to a high school where freshmen will begin a four-year phase-in.

* At the nation’s largest mall, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., teenagers under 16 must have chaperons after 6 p.m.

* This summer in King’s County, Wash., law enforcement officials used a helicopter to find and arrest underage drinkers partying in secluded areas.

One of the most puzzling and ironic aspects of the new wave of controls is that they are being proposed and enforced by the Summer of Love generation, one of the most pampered and individualistic groups of children ever raised (see accompanying story). Some suggest the controls may be a reaction to the disarray in the boomers’ own lives.

When social problems appear overwhelming, adults historically have grasped at whatever controls are handy, says psychologist Lawrence Steinberg of Philadelphia, who is studying national juvenile justice reform. Steinberg notes that clothing is a frequent target.

One of the problems with the current wave, Steinberg says, is that some adults fail to distinguish between things that need adult control and things that don’t. In some cases, he argues, kids are given too much freedom by the very same adults who are overly controlling in other areas.

“Censoring the kind of information that kids have access to over the Internet is probably a lot less important than monitoring kids’ whereabouts in the after-school hours,” Steinberg says.

As much or more than teenage crime or baby boomer hypocrisy, some researchers suspect the new restrictions stem from fundamental changes in adult attitudes toward teenagers.

Strauss theorizes that the shift is based on generational patterns that alternate between over- and under-protection of children. “Parents tend to raise children to become more like their own parents were than they themselves were,” Strauss says. “This is because of a self-correcting mechanism in the way a society raises children.”

The baby boomers were raised indulgently, but Generation Xers grew up in an era when society had relaxed its grip on children, says Strauss. “‘Now, what’s happening is children have become a fresh priority. There’s a desire to improve a new generation of children. It’s how society begins to return to a future focus after a period in which it did not have that.”

Now, boomers are looking for their children to become like the World War II generation: civic-minded, virtuous and stalwart, says Strauss. Over the next few years, he predicts, we will see magazine covers praising youths, and youths themselves returning to singable songs, teamwork and community service. A return to wholesomeness already is evident from the popularity of such young, clean-cut singing groups as Hanson, Strauss adds.

“Our advice to government is: Don’t overbuild prisons. This is not a generation you’re going to want to stuff in prison. Our society will love them.”

According to another theory, the new crackdown represents a historical pattern in which adults tend to view young people differently depending on economic and political circumstances.

When they are needed to serve in wars, for instance, they are considered capable and responsible, says social psychologist Robert Enright, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. But in economically insecure eras when they might be rivals for jobs, they tend to be viewed as immature, disruptive and needing guidance for a longer developmental period.

The new “zero tolerance” and other policies represent “the first wave of a new social experiment” to legislate social norms, says Enright. Asking for moral improvement is not such a bad idea, he adds. “But it’s a tightrope. We might choke off their liberties, and have to be careful.”

Complaints have begun to surface. Some fear that blanket policies such as curfews allow too much discretion for officials who enforce them, opening up the door for racial discrimination. Others say good kids get swept up in the net.

Parents in central Los Angeles, for instance, were shocked in June when 13-year-old students on an errand for their teacher were handcuffed in the hall by armed police looking for miscreants.

Even in family-friendly Monrovia, a group of parents is suing the city over its award-winning anti-truancy ordinance. Rosemary Harrahill, a home-schooling mother who has joined the litigation, says two of her children have been stopped a total of 22 times by police. Like others, they have been issued fluorescent identity cards to show police. Harrahill likens the principle to Nazi restrictions in prewar Poland. “They’ve targeted a class of people and they’re children.”

“The real question,” says Mayor Robert T. Bartlett, “is do you adapt the community to one or two families’ concerns, or do you try to do the most good you can for the most number of people in the community?” Citing truants--and fining parents--often inspires parents to become more involved, Bartlett says. “The gift we’re giving them is, we’re letting them know we care.”

Even Harrahill admits she feels safe in the “charming, little, wonderful city” but questions the price: Children becoming accustomed to a society where they routinely are stopped and questioned by police during the day.

Last year, an appellate court struck down San Diego’s nighttime curfew ordinance as being unconstitutionally vague. The city consequently revamped its law, which still allows police to arrest teens in public after 10 p.m.

Some wonder how much restrictions alone actually can accomplish.

Some students say locker searches, for example, lead to drugs being carried in pockets or backpacks.

Nazario calls the controls a “quick fix.”

“What we really need to do something about juvenile crime in America, is a lot more resources being poured into education and into opportunity for kids,” he says. “Something has to be done for kids with no access to after-school programs and the number of kids who live in poverty and families who don’t care or who are not there for them.

“Those are tough issues and cost money and time and are overwhelming for people. Instead, we go to the law and try to spank kids for getting out of line.”

Some officials who have implemented new restrictions are trying to temper them with softer interventions as well. For instance, at the Mall of America--where officials say as many as 4,000 kids used to gather on weekend evenings--family activities such as basketball and choral singing have been introduced on the weekends, along with the chaperon policy. Parents have been recruited and paid $20 an hour to walk side by side with security officers on patrol.

“If a security officer says, ‘You need to stop that,’ a young kid might say, ‘No, I don’t.’ With a mother, it’s a lot harder to do that,” says mall spokeswoman Teresa McFarland. “In some cases, these mothers might even know [the kid’s] parents.”

In the year before the new policies were enacted, McFarland says, there were 394 arrests of youngsters under 17 for disorderly conduct at the mall. In the year since the changes, there has been one.