Survey finds parental ignorance

Parents may be badly mistaken if they believe their mere presence at home prevents teenagers from drinking or using drugs out of their sight.

A third of children ages 12 to 17 -- and almost half of 17-year-olds -- said they had attended parties where drugs and alcohol were available despite parents being at home, according to a survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Half of those surveyed said they attended parties, with or without parental presence, where those substances were available.

The study suggested parents are ignorant of their children's party-going lives: Eighty percent of parents surveyed said they believed neither alcohol nor marijuana is usually available at parties their teens attend.

Joseph A. Califano Jr. , chairman and president of Columbia's center, compared the attitude of many parents to that of monkeys toward evil: ``They see no booze, they smell no pot, and they can't hear any of the alcohol and drug-related activity going on in their own home."

The survey, being released today at a Washington news conference, found that drugs or alcohol were less likely to be present when parents were home, but Califano said parents need to pry more to learn about their children's activities. He said that about the same percentage of teens abuse drugs and alcohol today as 10 years ago.

Columbia researchers interviewed by telephone a group of 1,297 children and 562 parents, most of them parents of the surveyed teens.

Auto accidents, homicides, and suicides are among the leading causes of death among children, and alcohol and other drug use are often a factor in such deaths, said John Knight, a pediatrician for the Center for Adolescent Substance Abuse Research at Children's Hospital Boston .

Knight said some parents allow teenagers to drink alcohol or use drugs at home, believing that chaperoning the activity and taking car keys away will protect the teens. He called the belief mistaken.

He said he keeps a file of news clippings of kids dying when parents had allowed them to drink at home. Tacit approval from parents puts teens at more risk for dangerous behavior, he said. Children who believe their parents disapprove of drugs and alcohol are less likely to abuse such substances, he added.

``Children give the appearance of not listening, but they deeply care about what their parents think."

Some teenagers who had attended parties where drugs and alcohol were available said in interviews with the Globe that parents usually aren't aware of the activity.

``Basically, any time there's parents around, people can be sneaking something," said 17-year-old Benjamin Mueller of Hollis, N.H., while shopping in Nashua.

He and Kyle Gay of Brookline, N.H., said teenagers should take responsibility for their own actions rather than blaming parents.

``I think parents who allow their kids to drink, I blame them . . . [but] parents who let their kids throw a party, and then bad things happen at the party, that's not necessarily their fault," Mueller said.

Cynthia Kuhn , a professor of pharmacology at Duke University Medical Center who has written several books about alcohol use and the brain, said the parts of the brain that process risk are the last to mature, meaning that teenagers are more likely to make rash decisions and need parental guidance.

``Parents need to assume that for any high school student, they have access to alcohol and marijuana and probably other drugs if they want to," she said.