By friendships, do you mean platonic?

Let me assume that you do.

That being the case, intergenerational friendships are crucial to a vibrant society. What better way can experience be transmitted to the young, and the fresh eyes of the young help the perhaps cynical to see things afresh?

This may be the biggest problem facing our culture: the artificial segregation of our population into separate and distinct age groups, whereby the elderly are cut off from those who could benefit from their years of observing the system from the inside, and the young are cut off from any source of information or opinion or belief except those of their indoctrinators, who naturally feed the kids only that which will enhance adult authority and the children's natural feelings of ignorance and helplessness, conditioning them to internalize the feeling that they need some external authority to tell them what to do.

What better way to prevent a revolution? What better way to condition the people to accept an eventual police state?

Forget pedophiles for a moment; separation of the generations hurts the society as a whole. Pedophiles are merely the excuse. We all suffer because of this.

As Phillip Ares observed in "Centuries of Childhood", not only is "childhood" a relatively recent phenomenon, but young people, in the past, grew responsible sooner and contributed more to society by becoming a part of it at birth. Now, children are kept in a bubble and only gradually accepted into our culture.

America raises children the way other countries raise mushrooms: keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em shit.