BABY BOOMERS, GROW UP

My husband and I are still acceptable company in our fifth-grader's eyes.
But our days are numbered.

Soon, we won't understand anything. The cut of our slacks and the style of
our shoes will be horrifyingly wrong. We'll be an embarrassment simply by
being alive.

We know this, and yet it still will come as a shock. Our parents never
expected to be cool forever, but we did. We thought we would reconfigure
the traditional family dynamics and never be seen in our teen-agers' eyes
as the hopeless killjoys our parents were to us.

But that's the deal. If you're the parent of a teen-ager, you're a dope and
a tyrant for a few years. So with a tight jaw and saintly patience, you
accept it.

Now comes a disturbing study that suggests many baby boom parents don't
accept it. In a recent survey of nearly 600 teen-agers in drug
rehabilitation centers around the country, 20 percent said they had used
drugs with their parents.

"They're buying for their kids, smoking pot with their kids, using heroin
with their kids," David Rosenker, vice president of adolescent services at
the Caron Foundation, a treatment program in Wernersville, Pa., told USA
Today. "When I started (working with youths) in the mid-'70s, this was not
happening."

The study floored me, but I guess it shouldn't have. We are the first
generation faced with the question from our children, "Did you use drugs?"

We have three choices in answering. We can say no. We can say yes, and then
describe the dangers. Or we can say yes, and tell them if they want to get
high, we'll do it with them.

I know the rationalizations for this third option. "Our kids are going to
try drugs anyway, so at least at home we can make sure they try them
safely," parents say. Or they say smoking pot together allows the child to
see the parent as a buddy in whom their teen can more openly confide.

One 17-year-old recovering addict told researchers he started smoking pot
with his father in his early teens. The son thought the father was "soooo
cool." Then the boy moved on to harder drugs on his own. He has been in and
out of drug rehab and group homes and boot camps the last two years.

"Parents need to realize it's more beneficial in the long run for parents
to be parents," he told a reporter. "There are enough people outside
telling us that things that are not OK are OK. Parents need to be a safety
zone."

As I watch my child grow up, I become more aware every day that our job as
parents is to be that safety zone, to set the standards so our children
will make good decisions.

When they are handed a joint or a tumbler of vodka at a party, we want them
to know we'll be disappointed in a poor decision, and we want them to care
that we're disappointed. If we don't set clear expectations, how will our
children know what's acceptable and what's not? What's dangerous and what's
not?

I'm still amazed at the number of parents who allow their children and
their friends to drink in their homes. "At least I know they're not
driving," one mother told me.

I wondered if she really believed that by allowing her son to drink at
home, she was discouraging him from drinking elsewhere. What she did, it
seemed to me, was let him know that drinking is OK for someone his age.

Steve Dnistrian, executive vice president of the Partnership for a
Drug-Free America, shakes his head at parents who say their kids are going
to smoke and drink anyway so they may as well do it at home.

"That's like setting the standard at C," he says. "So don't be surprised if
they come home and tell you they've snorted cocaine or dropped acid. You've
opened the door."

It's difficult to help a child grow up if we haven't grown up ourselves.