WHY I SAID NO

By MARGARET CARLSON

Like most yuppie parents, I read Dr. Spock for crucial information, like what to do about projectile vomiting and earaches. But unlike many of my contemporaries, I ignored him on discipline. As a captive of the permissive '60s, he could be of no help to baby boomers, already hopelessly ambivalent about authority. Better to rely on the example of my own parents, who believed their children's happiness in the future was dependent on being sharply disciplined in the present.

If you adhere to that philosophy during the Terrible Twos, it doesn't surprise your kids if you stick with it through the ticklish questions of sex, drugs and alcohol. It's at these times that children are uppity enough to ask, and some parents are foolish enough to reveal, what they did as adolescents. This is a big mistake in the drug wars. I asked myself: "Did hypocrisy matter when Courtney was little?" Absolutely not. Without any reference to my own early years of experimenting with electricity, I insisted that she not stick her curious fingers into electric sockets. Don't grab Johnny's sand bucket, I would tell her, although I'm sure I was a major bucket grabber. Don't eat with your fingers, I instructed. Well, I still do that.

When my daughter asked what I did and when I did it as we proceeded to the dicey teenage years, I thought, O.K., honesty is the best policy. Well, what's the second-best policy? Omission, because kids are so much better off not knowing everything about you. Authority flows more easily when there is some mystery about who you were as a child as opposed to who you are as the older and wiser parent they now know.

It's so tempting to give up that distance prematurely, because, well, there is so little distance after you put the Map of the States puzzle together, say, a million times. I watched many a soccer game whose rules I only dimly grasped, and was, immodestly speaking, one favorite carpool mom, but I never became my daughter's friend. It's tempting to do so when your offspring is crossing over from the things of a child to the things of an adult. I ruled out exchanging any confidences in the crossover areas of drugs, drink and sex, although a parent should counsel a child not to have any of the latter until true intimacy attaches or at age 25, whichever comes later.

Yes, I knew Courtney wanted to hang with the kids who were most likely to be fast-tracking every experience. She wanted to do what everyone else was doing, to which a parent can sometimes only say, "No, you can't," and to the follow-up of "Why not?," "Because I'm your mother, and I say so." I might not stop her, but I would certainly slow her down. I didn't go the confession route, either. If you let them confess and you don't put them under house arrest, you are admitting your own waning authority, which even kids don't want to know about before they are ready to run their own lives.

I revealed expurgated versions of my life, about term papers handed in late and the unchaperoned party, enough so that she wouldn't completely discount me as a dork sitting alone every Saturday night. We made it through adolescence without disaster and have entered a period when the perils of parenting have given way to the joys of it. And I've yet to tell her what I really did during the '70s. My own mother was fond of sighing deeply and saying, to explain anything I didn't like, "You'll understand when you have a child of your own." On the day she first heard me say to Courtney, "Because I'm your mother, that's why," she was as happy as a mother can be. Then, because we had waited, we became friends.