Independence Daze : Unsupervised Kids Face Loneliness, Temptations of Sex, Drugs

Given the choice between homework and television, most any 8-year-old would opt for the latter. So Ronny VanderMeer, with no one around but a 12-year-old to dictate otherwise, flicked on the cartoons.

“I’m going to call your mom,” announced Amber Nitchen, who shares an Anaheim apartment with Ronny, his mother and her own mother. Amber telephoned Cari VanderMeer at work, while her unfazed housemate stared at the TV screen. VanderMeer negotiated a deal: tell him he can watch TV for a bit, but he has to finish his studies before dinner.

Their mothers--single parents who support themselves with 8-to-5 clerical jobs--view the setup as less than ideal. “I know that Ronny would make better grades if I could supervise him more closely,” Cari VanderMeer said later. “But what can I do? I have to work.”

She was voicing a grievance expressed by 40% of the Orange County parents surveyed in a recent Times Orange County Edition poll. In answer to the question “What would you say is the main cause of problems for children growing up in Orange County today?” poll interviewees cited “lack of parental supervision” as their top concern--well ahead of drug use.

Thirty-eight percent of adults polled named lack of parental supervision as their major worry about children today, contrasted with the 22% who responded “exposure to drugs and alcohol.” Twenty-three percent of parents thought drugs were the overriding problem.

A lack of parental supervision might be perceived as the “umbrella cause of a number of problems facing children,” observed Elissa Benedek, a leading child psychiatrist based at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

“I am very surprised they picked ‘lack of supervision,’ because children’s access to drugs and alcohol is such a grave concern among parents today,” Benedek said. “Perhaps that category encompasses for them all of their concerns: drug use, teen pregnancy, access to guns, teen crime.”

On one end of the spectrum, children left to their own devices for large chunks of time might suffer lower grades in school and loneliness, said Irvine child psychologist Merritt Schrieber. “Loneliness is misery,” he said. “There are a lot of unhappy kids out there.”

And on the other end of the spectrum, unsupervised youngsters could be more susceptible to juvenile delinquency. “Day care essentially stops at 12 years old, just at a time that kids are most likely to experiment with drugs, cigarettes, alcohol and sex,” observed Greg Bodenhamer, director of Back in Control, an Orange-based parent-training program.

Fortunately, Amber seems to take a mature approach to her premature independence. “The kind of people who use drugs aren’t my type,” she said. Nor does she invite her boyfriend over when mom’s away: “I don’t want to get caught up in teen pregnancy and things like that.”

But there is a downside to her autonomy. Her mother, Tammy Jameson, expects her to clean house as well as keep tabs on Ronny when the two children are home alone. “Sometimes she forgets I’m only 12,” Amber said.

“I’ve been a single parent since Amber was 18 months old, and she’s been a latchkey kid since kindergarten,” said Jameson. “It’s taught her to be responsible for herself, but then again, kids should be allowed to be kids.”

The spiraling divorce rate along with the entrance of women into the workplace over the past 30 years have conspired to generate a rise in teen pregnancy, drug abuse and crime, Bodenhamer said.

“In almost every community, there used to be a network of parents made up of at-home moms who knew all the kids in the neighborhood,” he said. “Parents used to help supervise each others’ kids. That whole network has been destroyed--mom is at work, dad is at work--and we’ve replaced it with nothing.

“I’m not trying to put this on working moms,” added the former Orange County deputy juvenile probation officer. “The point is, we as a society need to do something about the supervision of our kids through structured after-school programs.”

Not every self-reliant youngster is as levelheaded as Amber. Costa Mesa resident Johnny Stevens, 16, spent a couple of rebellious years stealing cars for drug money and practically living on the street.

“I used to see mothers with their teen-agers at the supermarket, and I wanted to ask them, ‘How’d you do that? How’d you get him to come with you?’ ” recalled Johnny’s mother, Marsha Stevens.

A single parent who works nights as a registered nurse, Stevens somehow had lost all control of her own teen. She could not persuade him to come home in the evening, much less accompany her on shopping trips.

“Nothing I tried got through to him,” she said. “If I told him he couldn’t watch TV unless he quit ditching class, he’d just take off and live somewhere else.”

Johnny remembers those dark years--from age 12 to 14--as a time that he was looking for excitement and validation in all the wrong places. “I got a high off living on the edge,” he said.

He fell into a crowd of virtually unsupervised kids--of which there are plenty in Orange County, he discovered. “They’d say, ‘I’m going out,’ and their parents would say, ‘Oh, OK, whatever,’ ” Johnny said. In a fit of desperation, his mother finally shipped him off on a hard-core wilderness program for troubled teens. Gradually, Johnny began to redirect his life. Today the strapping young man is a straight-A student at Saddleback High School.

“If I hadn’t turned myself around, I’d be dead of a drug overdose by now,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

A danger in unsupervised teen cliques, Bodenhamer said, is that youngsters tend to gravitate toward the most aggressive--and often most daring--child in the pack.

“It’s like (the book) ‘Lord of the Flies,’ ” he said. “When there is no adult around to temper their values, the most charismatic kid will lead the others in terms of morals and behavior.”

Rachyl and Jennifer, who requested that their last names not be used, said that they run around with a group led by a troublemaker. “People look up to him as a big brother,” said Jennifer. “I once got arrested with him for marijuana. If he does something, everyone else will try it, and it goes on and on.”

The 17-year-old best friends were eating frozen yogurt and smoking cigarettes in the fast-food area of the Buena Park Mall--a hot hangout for Orange County teens. Rachyl is estranged from her parents and lives with her boyfriend and his parents in their Anaheim house, where Jennifer also camps out on a regular basis.

“My mother took drugs, and then she would tell me not to,” said Rachyl, a tall teen who looks older than her years. “I rebelled against her hypocrisy by using drugs myself. But now I’m off drugs--I only smoke pot every once in a while.”

Despite her “rocky childhood,” Rachyl said, “I don’t feel like I missed out. I’ve been suicidal a couple of times, but I’m not anymore. The good thing is, after you’ve been hurt and walked on, you draw a line. I don’t let anyone walk on me.” At a nearby table, a group of 17-year-old boys discussed their loosely supervised lifestyles. “My parents really don’t care where I go or when I get home, as long as I’m not escorted by a police officer,” Dennis, a high school junior in Fullerton, wryly commented.

He has, in fact, experienced a few brushes with the law. He once fenced stolen stereo equipment for drugs, although he says that now his criminal days are behind him. “Mom and Dad would come get me out of juvenile hall and try to ground me, but I’d just take off,” Dennis said. “But I grew out of that stuff.”

The happening hangout in Irvine is Northwood Town Center--where the children of affluent, frequently two-career parents cluster in the various eateries and stores. Irvine High buddies Erik Hersh and Joe Hatch, both 15, had stopped in at the popular Del Taco on a recent afternoon to quaff soft drinks.

Erik and Joe said that they come from well-regulated families--but know plenty of kids who don’t. “A lot of my friends go to school high (on alcohol), and their parents have no clue,” said Erik. “A friend who’s 14 goes home drunk, and his parents say, ‘You been drinking?’ and he says, ‘Yeah, what are you going to do about it?’ They have no control over him.

“A lot of kids intimidate their parents by threatening to run away from home if their parents try to discipline them.”

Joe said that he is “pretty happy” with his parents’ somewhat strict rules regarding curfews and itineraries. “I’ve known several people who’ve gotten in trouble with the police for having concealed weapons or drugs, or for stealing,” he said. “Some kids take advantage of their freedom.”

The boys’ parents are struggling with the ultimate dilemma in rearing teen-agers: At what point does supervision become too little or too much, in that pivotal segue between childhood and adulthood?

“It’s a very fine line that parents have to walk,” said Marlene Hatch, a registered nurse, whose husband, Stan, is an auditor. “It’s very hard for me to say, ‘Yes, you can go out this Friday night.’ Yet he’s about to turn 16--we can’t keep Joe under our thumbs 24 hours a day. I just hope to God we’ve taught him right from wrong well enough that he won’t do something he ought not do.”

Erik’s father, Wayne Hersh, a labor attorney in Irvine, concurred: “After they get to be about 12, you have to try to let them build their own self-discipline.”

However, Hersh conceded, setting the ground rules is a tricky feat for parents of teens. “When you become a parent, you aren’t handed a parenting manual,” he said. “I see some kids who are oversupervised, overcontrolled--and they’re about to explode. On the other hand, I see kids who are left on their own too much.”

Supervision, Bodenhamer said, is not synonymous with authoritarianism:

“It’s simply knowing where your kids are, who they’re with, what they’re doing, and that they’re safe.”

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