Pretending We Did Nothing Wrong

You, my friend, are lucky to be alive.

Consider that if you're over the age of 35, you were subjected to life threatening dangers verging on child abuse from the moment you were born until you left your parents' house.

Not only did you think seatbelts were for sissies, chances are your parents smoked no less than three packs of cigarettes in the house, over breakfast, on the phone and in the car every day of your life. Your parents spanked or switched. You rode bikes and skateboards unencumbered by helmets, pads or general adult supervision. You ran loose in the woods, along neighborhood streets and generally lived a latchkey life in which an uncooked brick of Ramen noodles could be considered a valid snack and you did your homework accompanied by Three Stooges shorts and reruns of "Gilligan's Island."

You drove at 16, perhaps not under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but certainly impaired by singing the chorus of "Pour Some Sugar on Me" or playing air drums along with "Tom Sawyer." You and your friends stole your parents' liquor, bought beer underage, smoked cigarettes and pot, dropped acid, felt each other up in the car and at the homecoming dance and probably had unsafe sex with people your parents would have considered unacceptable.

And yet you lived.

I point all this out not to be nostalgic or to somehow diminish the strides we've made as far as health, safety and parenting practice, but to remind parents not to freak out every time you hear about the next "dangerous teen fads."

 A posting from iVillage that a friend circulated on Facebook this week was a perfect example. In it, the writer warned parents in the shrill, hyper-vigilant style of local evening news reports of the myriad dangers our teens face from - wait for it - doing really stupid stuff.

The story goes on to detail what the latest batch of really stupid stuff entails - practices like vodka eyeballing, "rainbow parties" (I'll let you get the details on that yourself), and sexting.

Each item was couched in the same "We're shocked! Shocked, I say!" tone that usually accompanies any story about how horrified parents should be that their little angels are participating in anything so dangerous, seedy and crass.

What the writers failed to do was A) perform the least bit of journalistic vigilance into their piece; and B) put the latest stupid teen stuff into context with dangerous practices of the past or the present.

First, a little perspective. In each of the items featured in this piece, the sourcing is at best spotty and at worst completely anecdotal. Had I been their editor (and I have been an editor, so I know this kind of stuff) I would have happily handed the story back to the writers and said, "You need two things: real sources and real statistics." This story had few of either and consisted mostly of items cobbled together from other media accounts that were also poorly done.

For me, this sort of thing raises the same kind of red flags as those e-mails from deposed Nigerian royalty seeking help transferring money to the U.S. and from the freaky fringe types insisting that President Obama is the demon spawn of Joseph Stalin, Jane Fonda and Richard Roundtree from "Shaft." It immediately activates my highly sensitive bullshit detector, making me suspicious of nearly everything else the writers have to say.

Then there's the lack of context. I agree that pouring a shot of Grey Goose into one's eye isn't advisable under any circumstances (and is a waste of perfectly good vodka) , and yes, I'd be pretty disappointed to learn that my kid did it. I'd also be pretty mortified if I knew a child had participated in sexting or a rainbow party.

But if the definition of a "trend" is that more than two people have done it, then we're all guilty of participating in "dangerous teen trends." Think back on the things you did as a teen that you wouldn't even admit to your parents now that you're an adult. I can personally tick off several things I and my contemporaries did that would have, at the time, sent adults into spasms of outrage. They were stupid, dangerous and in many cases illegal (no names were mentioned, so relax, fellow members of the classes of 1982 through 1986).
 
But to go through what we (and likely every generation of teens) went through and then feign outrage at what is basically the same sort of behavior is the worst form of hypocrisy.

Instead, we should use our own experiences to inform how we raise our kids and warn them of real and very pervasive dangers: teen drinking and driving, use of prescription drugs for recreational purposes, easy access to legal firearms and getting knocked or fathering a child before they graduate from high school.

We should function not as helicopter parents who spend every waking moment thup-thupping above our kids making sure they are making the right decisions, but as adults who know the consequences of risky behaviors and can counsel teens on how to make the right decisions.

Then, when they have run the gantlet of their teen years and emerged relatively unscathed, they can also be amazed that they made it to the other side alive.