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According to stories popping up across the Webz, kids today are meaner, swear-ier, and (in our personal experience) punch-a-poster-on-the-subway-while-singing-loudly-in-Spanish-to-get-attention-ier. One mother talks about a to-do list she found her 8-year-old daughter making, which included the tasks "2. Make Nayla miserable, 3. Be mean to Nayla, 4. Pick on Nayla, 5. Terrorize Nayla a bit." On the one hand, kudos for using terrorize correctly despite being only 8. On the other hand, yeesh, we feel bad for Nayla.

A few theories exist for the ever-earlier emergence of the "mean girls" phenomenon, among them early-onset puberty; anonymous Internet cruelty (think about that, commenters); the "witticisms" of TV characters like Hannah Montana, whose idea of a good joke is to disrespect her elders and then make some kind of vaguely sexual remark.

At the same time that girls are turning into monsters at younger and younger ages, kids are also getting more creative with dirty words. By the time kids are 4 years old, they already have about 40 swear words tucked under their belt. Today's kids aren't necessarily swearing more than they were 30 years ago, but the stuff they're saying is way nastier, and they're learning it all much earlier. Hooray! Because even though it's kind of horrible, there's something secretly hilarious about a 2-year-old with a sailor's mouth.

If Whitney Houston was right (and when has she ever been wrong?) and the children are our future, we should all be very, very afraid. You never know when their tiny hands and dirty mouths will come for you in the night.