Parents try to understand today’s world through the world they experienced growing up. It won’t work. The transition from simple disciplinary problems to major police and health problem is the result not only of the passage of time but of major social upheavals.

For one thing, divorce has become a way of life, placing extra burdens on single mothers. For another, mothers, divorced or not, are out of the house and in the workplace in great numbers alongside fathers.

We are also still living with the legacies of the sixties. These include:

? The Vietnam War and its residue of conscientious resistance to laws viewed as unfair
? The notion that patents and children should be friends and equals
? The social acceptability of drug use
? The idea that individual rights take precedence over social controls

As Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal, president of Phoenix House, a leading drug treatment center in New York, points our, “Too many Americans are torn between the urge to condemn behavior of which they disapprove and the need to tolerate what they have somehow come to believe is not a matter of their business.”

Society no longer provides an automatic backup for a parent’s prohibitions. There is no clear social message. There is not even a clear medical message. Earlier reports about marijuana and its dangers were ambiguous, but the American Academy of Pediatrics now says, “The seriousness of the behavioral consequences of marijuana use is sufficient to cause great concern and prompt the pediatrician to counsel young people against any use of the drug.” Marijuana was once thought to be nonaddictive, unlike other moodaltering drugs. James McBride, author of the best-selling book The Color of Water, remembers telling his friends when he was a pot-smoking teenager, “ ‘ You can’t get hooked on reefer . . . I can stop any time I want.’ But deep inside I knew I was hooked.” A study sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse now confirms what he knew: Heavy marijuana smoking can lead to addiction, despite the fact that there are no abrupt withdrawal symptoms as there are with other drugs. Although this finding has been disputed, in 1996, marijuana was the number-one drug for almost two-thirds of the teenagers in treatment at the Pennsylvania-based Caron Foundation. Most authorities agree that for adolescents and preadolescents any marijuana smoking is hazardous. But youngsters focus on the conflicting reports and avoid looking at the latest information.

The messages regarding alcohol are also mixed. Parents may find themselves feeling uncomfortably out of step with the rest of the world if they say no. many adults see beginning to drink as a rite of passage and moderate alcohol use as an integral part of their own lives.

The parents of some high school seniors in a New York suburb condoned a beer blast during school hours to celebrate the end of the year—and even bought the kegs for the party. Twenty students cut classes and drank at the home of one of then while the parents of that student were present. These parents, along with some others, were outraged when school officials suspended the students because classroom attendance was required—and alcohol illegal.

Parents such as these are ambivalent about alcohol use and fearful that taking a clear stand on drugs or alcohol will “destroy our relationship.” One reason they won’t risk alienating their children is that in these days of divorce, the child may reject one parent in favor of the other, more lenient one. Even when there are two parents at home, the family may have no other relatives nearby, so that children become inordinately important emotional props. Fearful of being rejected or deserted, some parents avoid taking firm or unpopular stands, and when parents abdicate, other structures act as substitutes. Cults, which offer firm rules, a father figure to admire and follow, and the certainties of community living, may owe some of their popularity to the uneasiness parents have about assuming these difficult, traditional “I’m the boss, you’re the kid” roles. To be a good parent, Ellen Morehouse, executive director of Student Assistance Services, a New York-based alcohol and drug prevention organization, says firmly, “You have to love your kids enough to let them hate you.”