Parents Confused About Columbine’s Lessons as Anniversary Nears

Surreptitious bedroom searches, at-home drug tests, spying on a teenager’s e-mail. In this age of school violence and Internet sleaze, where does proper parenting give way to policing and paranoia?

Rearing adolescents has always been a challenge. But as the first anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings nears, experts suggest that parents’ task is more daunting now than ever.

Even parents of rebellious baby boomers in the ‘60s didn’t have to worry about their teenagers getting AIDS or communing with unsavory characters online. Guns were less accessible, extreme violence less prevalent in films and television.

“Columbine was kind of a wake-up call,” said Ginny Markell, president of the National PTA. “Parents were realizing they don’t know who their kids’ friends are, or what the climate of their school was like.”

The parents of the two Columbine killers, and parents of other young assailants, have been targets of lawsuits and nationwide second-guessing. In more than 30 states, parents can be held responsible for crimes committed by their children.

“There’s a lot of pressure on parents to be God,” said Phyllis York, co-founder of ToughLove International, a nationwide group that urges parents to take a tough stand with problem children.

“I see parents afraid of their kids a lot more today,” York said from her headquarters in Doylestown, Pa. “There are parents doing all the sports, all the things they can take their kids to--and then suddenly some of these kids are no longer very good kids.”

Advice to beleaguered parents can be conflicting. Should they seek family psychotherapy, or consider a rugged wilderness program designed to rein in unruly teenagers? Is home schooling a safer option than public school? Is it time to start surveillance?

Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian organization, offers tips to parents on how to search a teenager’s room if they suspect drug use. (“Search the room section by section from top to bottom.”)

The group’s Web site also advises parents to preview their teenagers’ video rentals and music purchases. “If Jesus were walking the planet today, would he buy this music?” the site asks. “If the answer is no, then your teen shouldn’t purchase the CD.”

But parental vigilance, if overzealous, can be as risky as neglect, some experts say.

“If you’re constantly challenging their honesty, reading their diaries, going into their computer, one catastrophic result is you’re going to push the teenagers out to peer groups, because they don’t trust the family anymore,” said Martin Glasser, a Phoenix child psychologist with a teenage son.

In the Denver suburb of Arvada, Cathy Daugherty said she hasn’t imposed tighter controls on her 17-year-old daughter despite the shootings at nearby Columbine April 20, when two teenagers killed 12 schoolmates, a teacher and themselves.

“I’ve tried to heighten my awareness of what she’s doing and maintain more open lines of communication,” Daugherty said. “As far as being more restrictive of her activity, no, I have not.”

Dr. Lynn Ponton, a psychiatry professor at UC San Francisco and mother of a teenage girl, says parenting today’s adolescents is “the toughest job in the world.” She advises parents to remember that risk-taking is an inherent part of teenage behavior.

“Teenagers take on risk primarily to define and develop their own identity--not to get back at parents,” she said. “Parents can aid their teenagers in the process of risk assessment. We can make their lives safer.”

Drugs are a dominant concern. A California company, ChemTrak, markets a do-it-yourself kit for parents who want to test their children for drugs at home.

The Internet--and e-mail--provide additional cause for worry, in part because many parents are less adept with computers than their children.

“There’s a great deal of anxiety hanging over parents today as they try to keep up with the changes,” said Pam Eakes, president of the Seattle-based Mothers Against Violence in America.

“It’s a Catch-22,” she said. “You want your children to be savvy and aware and interested, and yet there are criminals on the Internet, and they come right into your home.”

Eakes also faulted the entertainment industry for an “explosion of violence and sleaze.”

“It’s such a dominant force--songs that talk about cutting up girls after you’ve raped them, or killing police,” she said. “If an adolescent doesn’t have the counterbalance of a wonderful family, then you have the potential for another volcano to burst.”

Eakes’ organization sponsors a youth program called SAVE (Students Against Violence Everywhere), which has chapters at 100 schools in 18 states.

SAVE’s director is Jenny Wieland, whose 17-year-old daughter was killed in a 1992 shooting. She says parents should encourage adolescents to find their own ways to combat bullying and school violence.

“Kids really want to be empowered,” Wieland said. “We can try to profile the troubled students all we want, but it’s the other kids in the school who know who the problem kids are. We need to break through the code of silence.”

Public Agenda, a nonpartisan public opinion organization in New York City, says its recent surveys indicate most parents are confident about their own parenting skills but not so sure about their neighbors’. One survey found that more than 7 in 10 adults believe holding parents responsible for misdeeds by their children is likely to reduce crime.

There is a broad consensus that parents of teenagers should be vigilant, but parental responsibility laws remain controversial.

“Everyone who’s raised an adolescent has had some precarious moments,” said Sue Burrell, an attorney with the Youth Law Center, a public interest law firm in San Francisco.

“In criminalizing parental responsibility, you may be tearing down families more than you are helping them,” she said. “If the kid is rebelling and disobeying, then by prosecuting the parent, you’re making the parent seem even weaker.”

Burrell, who helped rear two stepsons into adulthood, said parents face a difficult balancing act.

“Of course you want parents to keep track of where their children are and be alert for danger signs,” she said. “A lot of parents are overwhelmed. They’d like to do the right thing, but they just don’t know what to do.”

The challenges of rearing teenagers often are compounded in single-parent or two-earner households where parents have little time to spend with their children.

“Parents are just not available,” said Dr. Michael Brody, a child and adult psychiatrist from Potomac, Md. “They’re involved in their own games and interests. They’re preoccupied with the stock market.”

Brody, whose two sons were teenagers in the 1980s, scoffs at the notion that so-called quality time can compensate for an overall paucity of parent-child contact.

“It’s such a joke,” he said. “Try to run a business on just quality time. It doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work with raising children.”

*

On The Net: American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry: https://www.aacap.org

Focus on the Family: https://www.family.org