Who needs drug-testing kits, satellite-navigation technology and even mobile phones if a relationship has a solid base, asks Marie Murray
Parents are increasingly aware of the dangerous influences that threaten their teenagers. With each new study of adolescents it seems another previously unimagined threat to teenagers is revealed. Binge drinking, dangerous depressions, peer pressure, unprovoked attacks, bullying, sexual expectations and drug abuse are just a few.
Tragic stories when things go wrong usually show that parents were unaware of the activities into which their child had been lured. The terrible truth that so many parents have had to confront has been summed up in a sentence: "We didn't know."
And this is what makes parents so anxious. This fear that their child may be the victim of a host of influences that could destroy his or her life and that they, as parents, simply didn't know.
This is because many parents have lost confidence in their capacity to tell if their child is experimenting dangerously. They have lost trust in themselves and in their teenager. They have lost trust in a world that can't be understood.
All the reports say it's dangerous out there - and this is where their children are going, out into the unknown dangers of modern teenage life.
What is a parent to do?
One response to this worry is to find ever-increasing ways of monitoring, tracking and testing the trustworthiness of the teenager. The latest is the home tester kit for drugs, dipped into a urine sample to determine if the teenager has been taking concoctions such as cocaine, ecstasy or heroin.
Other technologies may track the teen. Devices that use satellite-navigation technology, for example, can be attached to a mobile phone to locate almost anyone, anywhere and have, reportedly, attracted the interest of some parents.
But is this necessary? What would it be like to be a teenager returning home on a Saturday night to be met by your parents at the door, requesting a urine sample for drug testing?
Should the teenager also be breathalysed? Is there a way of determining how many cigarettes have been smoked? What about surveillance cameras to monitor study or general teenage activity? And why stop at that when diary reading, phone tapping, general snooping and social surveillance could be introduced? Or perhaps simple trust between parents and teens - warm relationships, mutual respect and compassionate concern - might suffice?
The truth is that the greatest protection a young person has going out on a Saturday night is the knowledge that he has parents who love, respect and trust him. Young people live up to our expectations of them.
External surveillance and control simply identify problems that already exist: the drug taking, the binge drinking, the deceptions, the anger, the lies.
They do not identify why the young person has had a need to engage in this behaviour. They do not teach internal control. They do not identify the message in the behaviour - and they destroy the last fabric of trust and cooperation between parents and teenagers who need to seek help, together, if things have got out of control.
Parents do not need a test kit to know if their child is unhappy, to know if school work is suffering, to know if there is anger, opposition, defiance, irritability or other difficulties to be addressed.
This belief in the power of parental intuition does not exclude the use of some practical technology, however. Most parents and teenagers benefit by having a mobile phone. This allows young people to keep their parents reassured of their safety, to alert parents to changes of plans, to contact them if the lift home does not turn up or if there is any situation in which the young person feels uncomfortable or in danger.
Many parents say they can even measure the growing maturity of teenagers by the degree to which they use their mobile phones to inform them appropriately about their whereabouts, to ask parental permission to stay out a little later or to explain what problem has caused a delay.
Knowing what has happened and that the teenager is safe removes a huge amount of the anxiety that can cause parent-teenager conflict. Teenagers, too, often like the security of knowing that parental help is a phone call away.
In this process of growing up, of becoming independent, of separating and individuating, there are ambivalent feelings of wanting to be totally independent and wanting to be minded. The mobile phone accommodates both emotions. It is easier to step out if you can ring back, and young teenagers often feel more confident about going to new places, meeting new people and trying out new activities with the insurance that if it doesn't work out they can communicate this and be rescued.
So at what age and stage should you give your child a mobile phone? It is a highly individual decision, based on home circumstances and taking into consideration the warnings about too much microwave exposure for the young brain.
Many parents provide the first mobile phone when the young person starts secondary school, because it gives some security of contact during this significant transition. Additionally, being able to text and receive texts from friends connects the young person to a communication network that has become part of friendship and social development among many teenagers today.
Other parents worry about health hazards, about the constant click-click of communication, about the demise of literacy in phonetic texting and about exorbitant telephone bills. The pros and cons are many. The decision is yours.
Whether or not you and your teenager decide on a mobile phone, if you opt for one it is important to use it not as a monitoring device but as a further facilitator of your contact with each other. It can provide the ideal opportunity for parents to ask their teenagers: R U OK?
This is the best kit for parental trust and teenage support.
Marie Murray, an author and clinical psychologist, is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital in Fairview, Dublin