n Kids are going to drink anyway, so they might as well do it at home, under adult supervision

n Restricting teenagers makes no sense when they’ll be on their own in college soon enough

n You’d rather be your child’s friend than an authority figure

If you answered “true” to any of the above, you are not alone.

But that doesn’t mean you’re right

Each fall, when Montgomery County, Md., high schools send home the list of families who have signed the Safe Home Pledge, Nancy Murray studies the document as if it were holy writ. “You better believe I examine it,” says Murray, a Burtonsville mother of four. The families on the list have agreed to abide by these rules for their teenagers:

(1) I will supervise parties or gatherings in my home.

(2) I will welcome calls from other parents when my child is hosting a party or gathering.

(3) I will call the parents for a Safe Home confirmation when my child is attending a party or gathering.

(4) I will not allow or serve alcohol, tobacco or other drugs in my home or on my property.

Lots of parents sign the pledge, often because of peer pressure: If everyone else is signing, how would it look if your name were not on the list? Who opposes keeping kids safe? But it’s something else entirely actually to pick up the phone and call other parents, especially when your kid is 15, 16, 17 years old.

Nancy Murray calls. She calls even though her kids are “so embarrassed.” She calls even when – especially when – she doesn’t know the parents who are hosting the party. She calls and runs through her questions: Will you be there? Will you be in the room? Will you be checking who comes in the door?

The host parents answer, sometimes readily, sometimes grudgingly. But, however the parent on the phone responds, Murray has concluded, “you really don’t know, no matter what they say.”

Murray, who has two kids in high school and two already finished, has learned not to trust other parents, even those she knows fairly well. “These are people I socialize with,” she says. “And they say, ‘Well, they’re going to drink anyway, they might as well do it at my house, where I can watch them and know they’re safe.’ I tell them that’s against our rules, and they say, ‘Oh, you’re being naive.’ “

Few parents realize until they are deep into the battle to keep their kids safe that the enemy is often other parents.

Parents from Hell

Remember the Frederick mom who drove around with three kids in her car trunk just because the kids “wanted to ride back there”? Or the mother who put her 4-year-old out of the car on the Beltway and sped away, bumping him as she left, all because “he wasn’t sitting down like he was supposed to”?

Bizarre cases such as those appall us. But there’s a far more powerful category of wayward parent stories: the tales of those whose behavior endangers not only their own children, but others – even yours.

Start with the ultimate case: Silvia Johnson, the suburban Colorado mom who entertained high school kids at weekly parties with Jack Daniels, Bacardi rum and peppermint schnapps. Johnson provided the liquor, did shots with the 15- and 16-year-olds, supplied the methamphetamines and joined the kids in taking them. And she sexually serviced at least five of the boys, right there at her parties. She did this, she told police, to be the “cool mom.”

Johnson, 40 when she was arrested in late 2004, told the police that she had permission from some of the boys’ parents to serve them alcohol. This turned out not to be true. But Johnson never backed down from her contention that her behavior was justified. “The guys would flirt with me,” she told interrogators. She was proud that they were interested in her. “Luckily, I’ve been able to stay in the shape I’m in. I haven’t exercised in 15, 20 years. My mom’s skinny, too.

“Guys can do it, and they’re considered studs. A girl does it, and she’s a slut. There’s no word for a female that’s a stud. The double standard, so to speak. I fell in love with being part of the group, in a way, ’cause that was never something I was a part of growing up. I was never in the popular group. I was never cool. Here, I was considered the cool mom.”

There was no double standard in the court where Johnson was sentenced a few months ago: She got 30 years, warming parents’ hearts nationwide.

Two types of parents

Ron McClain is the father of two teenagers who attend Montgomery Blair and DeMatha high schools; he is also head of the private Parkmont School in the District. As a father and a school leader, he has watched parents take sides, splitting themselves into camps more polarized than any teen cliques.

He has seen how parents who define themselves as interventionists come to view other parents as a threat. He also knows parents on the other side, who justify their more lax approach by telling McClain that “I want my child to be experienced, as long as he doesn’t get killed on River Road.” Some of those parents are more permissive on principle; others, exhausted by their children’s adolescent excesses, are defeated and discouraged. They’re just praying to get through it until the kid goes to college. They defend their hands-off parenting by saying, “Why should I pretend I have control over the kids when I know they’re going off to college in a year?”

These two sets of parents rarely speak to one another. When they do, the results can be ugly.

So, how much should we fear toxic parents? Can you really draw a straight line from parenting style to kids’ behavior? The state of Maryland tried to find out. In a comprehensive, decade-long survey of 35,000 adolescents, the state’s education department looked at how differences in parenting match up with differences in substance abuse.

Bingo: Kids who admitted to drinking or using illegal drugs were twice as likely to say that they can always change the mind of an adult to get their way. The study concluded that non-users are more likely to have a parent who always makes sure they wake up in time for school, more likely to say that a parent always worries about them if they don’t know where the teen is, and far more likely to report that their parents have rules about whom they can be with. (Non-users also seem to come from families that spend more time together. Drug or alcohol users are far less likely than non-users to report that their family eats together every day.)

Intentionally or not, some parents are communicating to their kids that it’s fine for teens to drink or smoke pot. While only 12 percent of non-users in 12th grade say their parents approved of them drinking beer, 38 percent of seniors who drink believe their parents are okay with that. Similarly, while only 3 percent of seniors who don’t smoke pot believe their parents approve of marijuana use, 15 percent of seniors who do smoke say they have their parents’ consent.

And while many parents believe teenage substance abuse is inevitable, the survey numbers tell a different story. Marijuana use has been in persistent decline at all grade levels in the Maryland study, with the most recent results showing that 16 percent of 10th-graders reported smoking pot in the last month, down from 23 percent in 1994. Drinking numbers also declined, though they are much higher, at 31 percent for 10th-graders, down from 45 percent a decade ago.

What do kids say?

What rarely comes up in the hand-wringing about toxic parents is just what the kids make of all this. As you might expect of people who are busy honing their ability to gauge who’s up and who’s down, whom to hang with and whom to avoid, teenagers are keenly aware of distinctions and divisions among parents.

Kids know that some of their friends seem to answer to no one, while others have parents you would never tell what’s really going on, and still others have parents who are perfectly fine to talk to, whether they are strict or permissive.

Kids were on to helicopter parents long before adults named the phenomenon: “It’s the hovering, the need to know every detail, that gets to me,” says Adam Clemons, a senior I met in a group of students at Richard Montgomery this spring. “The less I tell them, the less they’re on my back.”

“My mom has to know where I am, who I’m with, how many people are there,” says senior Anna Leonard. “That thoroughness makes me want to lie, even if I’m not doing anything wrong.”

On the other side of the divide, kids have seen checked-out parents in all their glory. “I sleep over at my friend’s house, and his parents don’t even know I’m there,” says senior Edward Schmiedel. “They don’t know who he hangs out with.”

One girl tells me about her friends’ parents who “are really naive and just stay upstairs whenever kids are over” or even “buy their kids the liquor ’cause they think teenagers will be teenagers.” Some of these parents are so eager to be considered cool that they drink with the kids. “God, get your own friends,” this girl says.

What many kids value is parents who search for a middle course. “The best parents have high expectations but allow your independence to start to develop,” says senior David Stone. “I have a friend whose parents allow them to get drunk, and their friends can come, too, if their parents say it’s okay. But I can’t go over there; my mom won’t let me. And, really, I don’t agree with what goes on there because they do it every single weekend. I can understand trying it once, but I don’t need it every week.”

A few weeks later, I got together with some of these same students for a no-names session where they could more openly discuss what their parents don’t know about their lives. But even with a grant of anonymity, the stories they told about their own behavior were not especially shocking. Some drinking, some pot smoking.

With or without names attached, however, the students made a persuasive plea for parents who set clear boundaries. What really set them off was the bad behavior of mothers and fathers who drink with kids, who supply alcohol, who seem oblivious to their children’s problems. “I have less respect for those parents,” said one boy. “They think they’re the cool parents. But they’re not responsible.”

What some parents don’t get, several kids said, is that “nobody cares if the parents are cool.” What they do crave is parents who act like parents.

A senior girl spoke of attending a New Year’s party where more than 100 high school kids showed up, drank heavily and tore the place apart right in front of the father of the house. “It was freaky,” she says. “I didn’t have any respect for him. He was in the room the whole time, and he just let it all happen. I would never allow that kind of party in my house. He’s supposed to be the parent.”