Many Boomers Keep Tight Rein on Teenagers

They tuned in, turned on and dropped out.

But a new USC study of parents who came of age in the 1960s found that many say they are keeping their own children on a much shorter leash.

“Many baby-boomer parents who grew up in the sex-and-drug-drenched 1960s are keeping an unapologetic rein on their teenagers,” according to a summary of the study, which will be released today. “Today’s parents, even those who were raised in liberal households, are undertaking dramatic reversals from how they were brought up,” said USC sociology professor Elaine Bell Kaplan, author of the study.

“I had assumed that parents who grew up in the liberal 1960s--with its emphasis on civil rights--would be sympathetic to their children’s privacy rights.”

In fact, “the parents who used the most control over their child were parents of the ‘60s. Some were former hippies,” Kaplan said. “They said, ‘I did the sex and rock stuff.’ Now they see the consequences of it: HIV, drug addiction.”

Even so, a lot of the parents look back on the America of the tumultuous 1960s as a much safer place, with fewer potential pitfalls and dangers. One typical mother affectionately recalled her “hippy life” in San Francisco, doing “everything from expressing myself sexually to doing coke and other drugs.”

But such youthful experimentation with sex and drugs seems tame compared with the real-life drugs-and-guns dramas that ensnare the teenagers they see in the news today--children from middle-class families a lot like their own.

“There’s more to fear now,” another mother said.

The parents’ worst fears revolve around the kinds of young people they see on television news: The boy who crashed a private plane into a Tampa, Fla., high-rise. The young man from Marin County who fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The two teenagers who shot and killed 12 students and a teacher at Colorado’s Columbine High School--all unleashing criticism that parents did not know what went on in their children’s secret world until it was too late.

Parents said the spate of school shootings made them wonder if their sons, too, were capable of violence. They said they were disconcerted by media accounts of families who say they were blindsided by their sons’ crimes.

“It’s like the young man accused of raping the girl in Orange County; his parents described him as quiet and well-behaved,” Kaplan said. “What’s really going on in their kids’ lives?”

Some parents are resorting to unusual measures to try to make sure they find out. They are spying on their children’s e-mail, eavesdropping on their phone conversations and searching their rooms.

Most evidence, Kaplan said, suggests that American children overall are doing well. But parents, haunted by news reports that fan their worst fears, are concerned, and “with some reason,” she said.

“These kids are living in a different kind of environment than 10 years ago,” she said. “The culture views them as more sophisticated, and treats them as if they can handle more than they really can. Boys are being sexualized more quickly than they can deal with it.”

Ironically, it was mostly parents raised in conservative households who told Kaplan they could trust their children on their own. Parents raised in liberal households told her they were afraid of what might happen if they gave their children more free rein.

Kaplan interviewed 32 parents for the study, a third of them from Southern California and two-thirds from Northern California. The two-year study was funded by the UC Berkeley Center for Working Families with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Kaplan said the parents constituted an average sampling for a qualitative study based on extensive interviews. The parents were college-educated professionals: lawyers, movie industry executives, nurses and computer analysts. Their annual incomes ranged from $65,000 to $150,000.

Four of the parents were Latino, seven African American and 21 white, and they ranged in age from 39 to 55. The children ranged from 12 to 17 years old. Two-thirds were enrolled in private schools.

The parents seemed to find children less easy to control, something Kaplan attributed to their empowerment at young ages by advertising, TV shows and films that pander to the youth culture.

“Kids argue, ‘You’re not the boss of me,’” Kaplan said. “They’re in a culture that is quite different than years ago.”

One mother complained of having to worry about her teenagers drinking and having sex as early as middle school. Other parents worried that rap music lyrics emphasizing violence and degrading sex were influencing their children.

“If I had known it was going to be this hard,” one parent told Kaplan, “I wouldn’t have had a kid.”

Parents had several strategies for keeping tabs on their children.

One mother of two teenagers, knowing that her daughter had tried Ecstasy, hugs them when they return to see if she can detect the scent of alcohol or marijuana.

A father began to read his son’s e-mail after the Columbine shooting--until his son caught on and learned to erase it. Several mothers, after reading that one of the Columbine shooters kept weapons in his closet, began to search their sons’ rooms.

One Bay Area mother interviewed for the study recalls being “out there smoking dope and demonstrating for women’s causes” when she was young.

As a parent, she has taken a sharp U-turn, fearing what could happen if her son became involved in drugs. She is determined to avoid it--by any means necessary.

She has even developed a “crazy mom” routine to control her son. She tried it once when he was out past midnight at a “drug party.”

“I got the address of the party and I was so mad,” she told Kaplan. “I jumped into my car, hair in rollers, PJs and slippers and went over just as Mark was coming out. I yelled at the top of my voice: ‘Mark, Mark, here I am.’”

Since then, she has found that the threat of subjecting her son to this humiliating tactic “really works for me.”

“Can you imagine seeing your mother in her pajamas and rollers standing on the front lawn of your friends’ house?” she said. “He took one look at me and ran for the car.”