TRUE CONFESSIONS? WHEN TEENS FACE TEMPTATIONS, PARENTS
MUST WEIGH HOW MUCH TO TELL ABOUT THEIR OWN IMPERFECT PAST

You're counseling your teen not to drink with friends after the prom,
but you once had a few too many beers when you were in high school.

Should you 'fess up?

It's a tough question. While all parents must find their own comfort
level, local experts offer these guidelines: Answer questions
honestly. Avoid going into detail. Make sure you talk about the lesson
you learned and what you would do differently knowing what you know
today. "I would lean towards discretion. But I think it's disingenuous
to say one never did anything.

I think sharing in a way that doesn't necessarily provide every last
detail is the way to go," says Raymond V. Tamasi, who has two grown
children. Tamasi is chief executive officer of Gosnold, Inc., a
Falmouth-based mental health treatment system that includes alcohol
and drug-abuse programs. Parents' experience can be reeled out a
little at a time, telling children enough to answer their questions,
based on their age, says Kathleen Jespersen, a teacher, mother of
four, and founding member of Falmouth's after-prom parties. "Remember
when kids were little and asked 'Where do babies come from?' You gave
them truths, but you didn't give them more than they could handle.

"I think when kids are teens, they're dealing with sex, drugs,
relationships. They're trying to figure it out and they need to figure
it out. It's their life." The 76.1 million baby boomers born between
1946 and 1964 grew up in a time that included - for many - questioning
authority, experimenting with drugs and sex, and challenging societal
norms with casual sex (free love, in the vernacular of the time) or
living together before marriage.

Those changes were in place for the generation that followed, and many
members of both groups are now parents trying to raise teens in a
permissive but dangerous world. "As parents, we have a great deal of
fear," says Cindy Horgan, co-founder of the Parenting Station, a South
Yarmouth-based consulting and education firm that conducts parenting
workshops.

Horgan says her generation worried most about the life-changing
possibility of unwanted pregnancy, while today's teens also face the
life-threatening specter of AIDS. A parent's experience can be a
filter, Horgan and Jespersen say, a tool to help parents focus on
asking their children questions that encourage communication. Horgan's
16-year-old daughter, Casie, a sophomore at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional
High School, says she appreciates knowing she can talk to her parents
about sensitive subjects.

But, she says, it's important to her that her parents recognize the
signals and back off if a subject gets uncomfortable. And she
definitely doesn't want too many details from their past experiences
from an era that she knows very little about anyway. The generations
seem to agree that too many details can actually hamper conversation.
"If I sat down and told my children all the mistakes I made, I wonder
if I (wouldn't be) giving them permission to do the same," Jespersen
says. As a teacher, she saw firsthand last year that young teens
picked up immediately on the unintended message delivered by a
well-dressed, obviously successful, motivational speaker who told
Falmouth High students about his years as an alcoholic. "I knew this
was going to happen.

On the way out of the auditorium, a couple of kids said to me, 'So,
Mrs. J, I can be an alcoholic for five years and then be rich.'"

Open communication If at least some teens are taking a cynical
approach to society's "just say no" message, how do parents get across
the idea that dangerous behaviors can kill or ruin lives?

Especially, how do they do that without detailing their own mistakes?
Horgan says teens have a right - and a need - to know about alcoholism
or other partly hereditary conditions that may directly affect their
lives. In the same way you would make children aware of a history of
heart disease or diabetes, you need to let them know if they are at
risk for addictive behaviors so they realize their increased danger in
experimenting with drugs or alcohol. As for details, both Horgan and
Jespersen advise keeping open lines of communication and sharing
particulars on a need-to-know basis. "If I saw one of my children was
making one of the bad choices I did, I might step in and be more
specific," says Horgan, who has five children, including four teens.
Gosnold's Tamasi says, "Children are well-served by parents who are
willing to talk about these things and not go silent.

Parents should talk in advance about what they're willing to say so
they're not caught by surprise.

And learning a little more about drugs and alcohol ahead of time will
make you better informed when you have these conversations." Lee
Kittredge-Parrott, 27, a Falmouth real estate agent, says having open
communication with her parents (she lived with her mom and stepfather,
and saw her dad regularly) gave her the sounding board she needed. "My
mom and I are inseparable. I could tell her anything and she would
tell me anything.

As emotional as it was, it was always out there.

It was the same with my dad. Being patient and having a sense of humor
(in both generations) made it easier," she says. Kittredge-Parrott
says her stepfather's stories about traveling around Europe were a bit
more adventurous than her mom's travels in South America, but still
tended to have a cautionary element.

Her mom, she says, was conservative about alcohol and warned
Kittredge-Parrott against drugs, saying they just weren't worth it.
"My mom said she always hated not having control over a situation."

Model behavior But, she told her daughter, if you must experiment, do
it at home. Because of that, Kittredge-Parrott says, the one time she
and a friend did whiskey shots, it was in her own basement, and she
came to her mother when the alcohol made her sick. "My stepfather
thought we'd be okay, but my mother wanted us to get checked out. They
took us to Falmouth Hospital, just to teach us a lesson.

I remember sitting on the stretcher.

It was humiliating for me seeing my first-aid teacher and my friend's
mom, who worked there," Kittredge-Parrott recalls, a decade later.
"The next morning, I didn't feel very well and my mom said, 'That's
your punishment.'" After she graduated from college, Kittredge-Parrott
says, her mom shared more details of her own past. "Growing up, I
think it was edited more than it is now," she says. Jespersen says she
thinks the rules and standards parents set - and live by - when their
children are growing up matter more than any teenaged mistakes parents
made decades ago when they themselves were trying to grow up. That's
true, local experts say, and parents have to remember they're being
watched. "It's fine to say, 'Yes, I tried marijuana because I thought
I was a more social person with it, but clearly my abilities were
impaired,'" Tamasi says. "But alcohol is the most prevalent drug of
abuse today and that becomes a little more difficult to talk about if
you're having three martinis with dinner." It's up to parents to model
responsible behavior because society generally won't. The only recent
exception, Tamasi says, is anti-smoking sentiment born out of an
extensive education campaign. "Kids actually shamed their parents into
stopping smoking.

I wish they (society) would put that effort into anti-alcohol education."

What to tell?

What do you say if your teenager asks, "Dad, have you tried drugs?"
Local experts offer some tips: Answer honestly, but don't elaborate.
Use the question as a starting point to figure out why your child is
asking now. Talk to your spouse ahead of time so you know how much
you're willing to share, and aren't surprised when a question arises.
Be sure to answer through a present-day lens, expressing what you
learned or what you wish you hadn't done. Remember that the behavior
your child sees from you matters more than some distant past.