1. There are gifts that your child is thrilled to receive, but you are less than overjoyed to give:

Enough said.

2. There are gifts you feel wonderful about giving, but on the receiving end, your son…well, not so much:

This one, by the way, was given two years ago and has yet to come out of the box. My son apparently loves pasta a lot, but not so much as to motivate him to make his own.

3. Finally, there is that sweet spot of gift-giving, the present that you love to give and your teenager loves too.  This next gift works for me for the obvious reasons — it’s not electronic, ridiculously inexpensive, charmingly old-fashioned and won’t be broken, lost or forgotten in a flash. My 14-year-old loves it because it’s fun and challenging and absurdly satisfying. Here are the basics, which you might even already have lying around the house and which you can get for about $2 if you don’t:

I’m not sure if this has a name, but together these parts add up to an ingenious sum: a ridiculously entertaining game that you can set up anywhere, inside or outside. I got the idea from my nephew, who got the idea from his summer camp, where they know more than a thing or two about what boys find entertaining.

You screw the hook into the ceiling, tie a string to it and tie the metal loop at the end. Then you measure enough string to reach the nail that you have hammered into the wall somewhere across the room. (I guess if you do it outside you hang it from the branch of a tree and put the nail in the trunk.) The object of the game is to swing the string in a circle and try to catch the loop on the nail, like this:

I’m confident that this one is going to outlive the shelf life of the latest video game, particularly as it’s apparently the logical thing to occupy yourself with when you’re supposed to be doing homework. You may want to learn from my experience and encourage your son to set this one up somewhere other than within reach of his desk.

This occurred to me during the past week as I’ve pondered how to motivate my ninth-grade son to be less of what his English teacher calls “a minimalist” and what I call a plain, old under-achiever. With report cards issued and parent-teacher conferences underway, I’ve heard some parents talk about how they react to grades they believe are too low (which is often different from a universally acknowledged “bad” grade).  There are phones and laptops taken away, video game privileges revoked, and even grounding.

I have considered such steps, too, but ultimately I hesitate – and not only because I’m not sure those methods work. I hesitate because after all these years, I’m getting to know myself as a parent. While I might look at other (stricter) parents with envy, thinking that they have the answers to automatically get their wayward teens in line, I know that I can only parent….as I parent.  Which is to say that if were graded on “consistently enforcing rules,” I would get a B-minus, at best. On punishing, I’d probably do even worse.

My son knows it, too. When his friend’s mother asked the other day if he ever got grounded, my son said “naah, my Mom knows it doesn’t work.” He might have meant that getting grounded wouldn’t motivate him to work harder in school, but I think he also meant that we both know that grounding doesn’t work for me. I’m sort of like those goofy parents in the movie Easy A who can’t say “you’re grounded!” without laughing.

Going with my inner parent would be easier, of course, if I didn’t have doubts, which it seems that all parents of teenagers have, particularly if they ever converse with other parents. This weekend, when a mother of older teens told me that yes, she punishes disappointing grades by taking away cell phones, computers and television privileges, I went on my typical roller-coaster of doubt and started thinking perhaps I really should do the same.  But when I asked her if the punishment works, and she said “Absolutely, we do it all the time,” I couldn’t help asking myself the obvious question: if you have to do it all the time, how is it working?

This brought me right back to where I am and need to be: muddling through in the way that comes naturally to me, and makes sense for my child. I am not a total slacker – I am trying to help my son with time management and discipline and meeting higher expectations. I will continue to seek out and try new methods that make sense to me. But to try to turn into a different kind of parent is a sure way to fail both myself and my child. He has to follow his path, and I have to follow mine.

In late 1990, I was working as a newspaper reporter in Florida, living a spunky Brenda Starr kind of life, tooling around in my light-blue Chevy Nova (with tape deck!), living in an apartment nearly as small as my car, and learning the ropes of journalism while covering everything from night cops, to city politics to suburban alligator trappers.

But then the Soviet Union started to collapse and the appeal of being a reporter in Florida began to pale in comparison to the thought of working as a journalist in Russia. It wasn’t as crazy as it sounds; I had a degree in Russian Studies and had spent a summer in Moscow during college. I heard about a new English-language magazine being published by a Dutch journalist and with the kind of 20-something persistence that is but a faint memory today, I talked myself into an internship and a temporary place to stay.

And then I quit a perfectly good job in Florida and moved to Moscow.

I’m sure my parents were nervous about my moving alone to what was then still the Soviet Union, but they didn’t burden me with their fears. And they didn’t discourage me from quitting my job.

This may be because quitting perfectly good jobs is something of a family tradition.

My father, after years of working as a corporate lawyer, decided he wanted to start his own business. So despite being the sole financial supporter of a wife and three daughters, he quit his job and set up shop in my sister’s bedroom. He gave up the Manhattan law firm with all its trappings (like, say, a good salary) for the thrill of building something from the bottom up. This was no rich boy’s fancy. Born during the Depression into a poor family that never got beyond lower middle-class, my father had worked his way through college and law school. Many would have said that by working in a law firm, he had finally arrived. But he wasn’t where he wanted to be, and so he quit.

My mother’s father was also a risk-taker, but admittedly at a time when he had less to lose. Fresh out of law school and days into his first job at a law firm, my then single grandfather got a call from a buddy who said he’d finagled two cheap tickets on a liner to Europe. My grandfather had never been to Europe, and couldn’t resist. He marched into his boss’s office and asked for some time off. “How much?” his boss asked. “The whole summer,” my grandfather said. I believe the conversation ended when my grandfather quit his perfectly good job and went home to pack for his adventure in Europe. And I’m quite sure that not once during his nearly six decades as an attorney did he regret spending that time abroad.

I worked at the magazine in Moscow for about six months, and then returned to Florida to work as a magazine writer and get married.  A few months later, when my former boss in Russia decided to start an English-language daily newspaper, he asked me to be the features editor and my husband to be the business editor. My husband loved his job covering the booming real estate industry in Florida, but with that 20-something persuasiveness, I convinced him to quit his perfectly good job and move to Russia with me.

“What have you got to lose?” I said. “We have no mortgage, no kids, hardly any furniture. Let’s just do it.”

We moved to Moscow in the summer of 1992, joining an incredibly talented group of journalists from the United States, Russia, the Netherlands, Britain, and Australia, many of whom had also left good jobs behind to help establish The Moscow Times, which became a world-class daily newspaper. It was a challenging and fascinating time, which led to great friendships and unimaginable career opportunities.

We stayed in Moscow for six years, years that we wouldn’t have had if we each hadn’t been bold enough to give up something good for the promise of something we thought would be better.

So on this 20th anniversary of The Moscow Times, which continues to thrive, my wish is not only that my children will follow their passions and find jobs that they love, but that they will be ready, if the right opportunity arises, to take a leap away from security to try something thrilling.

But what was really embarrassing was that a little while later, when my son asked who’d been looking at two of his Facebook messages (I still can’t figure out how he knew), before I could think about it, I was lying.

“Not me,” I said, busying myself with some suddenly urgent laundry folding. “I went on your laptop to turn off the music, but that’s it.”

My husband said that he hadn’t looked at the computer, and I knew my son believed him; though he loves his children dearly, my husband is just genuinely not nosy or intrusive about their social lives.

While hiding in the laundry room, I realized what a fool and hypocrite I was being. I am trying to raise my boys to respect people’s privacy and always tell the truth. And here I was snooping and lying. I went upstairs and confessed and apologized. My son, rushing out to a baseball game, just shook his head at me. He didn’t say what a lot of parents I know have said when their teenagers have lied about bad behavior, which is that they were less upset about the naughty behavior than by the fact that their children had lied. My son didn’t say it because he probably didn’t care that I’d lied; he was just really mad that I had looked at his messages (even though he is told time and time again that nothing on Facebook is ever really private).

But maybe he didn’t say anything about my initial dishonesty because he knows what I hadn’t realized until that moment — that lying to save your ass can come so quickly that you don’t even think about it. And while it is definitely better to have the immediate instinct toward honesty, what matters in the end may be what you do in the end. I’m sure there will come a time before my boys graduate high school when they lie to me about something they did. I hope I can remember that some essentially honest, good people, some whom I may be intimately acquainted with, have been known to lie to save themselves. It may not be admirable, but it’s human.

This was no 9th grade femme fatale he was describing. It was his new airsoft gun. A sniper.

As I watched my 14-year-old son gazing at his beloved, I flashed back to the day when he was three and pretending to be an armed robber. Like any well-intentioned, politically-correct and completely naive young mother, I said, “no, sweetie, we don’t play with guns. Guns hurt people.” My son stopped, looked at me with withering condescension and said “Mommy, it’s pretend.”

He had a point, and one that was hard to argue with. I decided to give his imagination free reign. My hunch was confirmed by a book I reviewed that argued that playing cops and robbers, and even violent video games, allows children to safely explore frightening emotions. I would not put a damper on my son’s pretend play just because I didn’t like the content. Besides, I’d heard enough about boys working around bans on toy weapons to think it was a losing battle; my favorite was the one about a toddler in a Jewish pre-school who was so determined to arm himself that he chewed his matzoh into the shape of a pistol.

Having surrendered in the weapon war, I then had the pleasure of watching my boys move from pretend guns to light sabers, pirate swords, water pistols, nerf guns, archery and riflery at camp, and paintball, a progression culminating in my first born using his bar mitzvah money (!) to buy an airsoft gun and a bucket of ammunition.

I told myself that by not paying for the airsoft gun, I wasn’t truly enabling his gun lust. But who was I kidding? I could have said no, and I didn’t. With some ground rules, including the obligatory protective goggles, I let him shoot targets against the garage and join airsoft “wars” with friends who have larger yards and not so many little children running around.

But the truth is, guns of all kinds scare me and I wish my son didn’t like them, even though I can see that he is shooting not to hurt anyone, but to win. I may have set this course in motion by caving on the weapon issue years ago, but a three-year-old pretending to be a swashbuckling pirate is a lot cuter and easier to accept than a 14-year-old pretending to be an assassin.

My discomfort may be a case of parenting paranoia, of worrying less about what my son is actually doing — playing a war game with willing friends — than about what I fear it might lead to in the future.  I didn’t worry that my toddler was going to grow up to be Captain Jack Sparrow, so why should I worry that my teenager is going to turn into Jason Bourne?

I am hoping this is just a phase, a fascination with machismo for a boy who is not yet a man, an adolescent version of a very small boy’s love of very big construction trucks and dinosaurs.

But still, my questions remain: is teen-aged boy gun lust innate and inevitable? And should it be tolerated or curtailed?

Eleven years ago this morning, my husband overslept and missed another train.  One that would have gotten him into the city in time to catch the subway downtown, to a conference in the Marriott beneath the World Trade Center.

That same morning, my brother-in-law decided to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks before taking the subway down to his job on the 84th floor of the South Tower. The express train came and it was crowded; he didn’t feel like standing, so he took the local. By the time he was climbing the stairs out of the station, the towers were burning.

Random minutes mattered that day. Unpredictably, unreasonably, and for so many people with unfathomable cruelty, the minutes made a difference.

For months after September 11, it was hard not to think that small decisions could have big consequences. If one of my boys lagged on the way to school and I realized I might miss the 8:17 train to Grand Central, I’d wonder if that was going to be the best delay of my life or the worst. Living with that kind of anxiety was exhausting. It would be months before I stopped flinching every time a plane passed over the house, before I could put the fresh, raw awareness that awful things can happen to anyone at anytime, back into a deep, neglected corner of my mind.

When my boys were in elementary school, each went through a period of extreme anxiety. When my older son was in fourth grade, he worried about getting sick. Every cut or scrape sent him into a panic. For a few weeks, he was hyper-aware of his body, afraid of every unfamiliar feeling or flicker of discomfort. A year later, my younger son suddenly became anxious about going to school; for a month or so, it was like there was a force field preventing him from crossing the door into his third-grade classroom.

While I tried to understand what set off my sons’ worries, I came to see their anxious phases as a kind of developmental gridlock. For each, the worries kicked in when they suddenly were old enough to have the intellectual understanding that terrible things could happen, but didn’t have the emotional maturity to cope. They didn’t know what to do with this new awareness that everyone doesn’t live happily ever after. And so they worried.

I got some insight into this one day at lunch, when my younger son, until that year an almost unbelievably sunny child, looked up from his tuna fish sandwich and said, “I think I know what I’ve been worrying about, Mom. I’m afraid of dying.”  He told me that he had seen a photograph in the newspaper of a 10-year-old girl in the Middle East who had been killed. Before that, I don’t think he had really comprehended that children could die. With this new knowledge, how could he not worry?

With some support and advice, but mostly with time, my boys each moved beyond anxiety. The random cruelty of the world may make them flinch, and sadden them, but it doesn’t overwhelm them anymore.

Driving with my 12-year-old a few days ago, we heard a radio report that a New Jersey man watching his grandson’s soccer game was struck by lightning and killed.

“Maybe he just wasn’t meant to live,” my son said,  attempting to find reason in something so unfair and inexplicable. But then he said. “No, I don’t believe that. It just happened.”

It is sad that growing up means learning to accept that the world is full of misery, violence, illness and accidents. It is tragic for children, like those whose parents died on September 11, for whom death and loss are not theoretical worries, but realities they must deal with every minute of every day. But that any of us can have the awareness of how little control we have, yet continue to find joy and hope for the best and even believe that everything will be all right, is also a triumph.

On page 14, Frank Bruni reviews Every Day, David Levithan’s new novel for young adults. Bruni gave the novel a mixed review, finding it poignant but occasionally heavy-handed and far-fetched. He did concede, however, that the issues it explores — about love and its powers to transcend external beauty, race, gender and the logic of physical reality — are particularly relevant to teenagers.

So why don’t I want my son to see the review? Because he loved the book. He was given an advanced reader’s copy by the owner of our local children’s bookstore and returned from camp declaring it “the best book he’s ever read.” I don’t want the critique of a middle-aged man to dampen my son’s sheer joy at reading this book. Or any book.

I get the idea that if you really love something, you love it flaws and all. And that you should be able to defend a book you think was assessed unfairly. And that you should feel comfortable with opinions that go against your own. But I think there should be years and years of pure pleasure from reading before one starts parsing the comments of professional critics.

I went to Brown in the ’80s, when Theory (yes, that capital T is intentional) trumped literature. Jeffrey Eugenides was there, too, and in The Marriage Plot, he captures the mood far better than I can. I’ll just say that in the Comp Lit seminar I took on “Proust, Joyce and Faulkner,” the arguments between the theorists/semioticians and what I’ll call the traditional readers got so heated that one day a volume of Remembrance of Things Past was hurled across the room. Quite a few students in that class could have told you a lot more about Derrida than Dickens. And I often found myself thinking “shouldn’t we read the books — really read and get immersed in them, maybe even enjoy them — before we deconstruct them?”

Maybe I’m being over-protective.  If my son started reading Bruni’s review, he would probably stop halfway through and ask “who is this guy anyway? And why should I care what he thinks?”

Indeed.

In the last chapter of  “Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success,” Madeline Levine’s ubiquitous new book about the dangers of over-parenting, there are all sorts of suggestions for being better parents. But the odds that I’m going to write out my family values and tape them to the refrigerator door are even worse than the likelihood of my 14-year-old son coming downstairs to tell me that he just finished all his summer science work and would like to take out the garbage.

I know I should emulate good parents, and take advice from people like Levine. I’m just not inspired to. But tell me in disdainful detail about the parents who jumped the rope at an Easter egg hunt to make sure their children got enough chocolate eggs and Marshmallow Peeps and I will not only raise my eyebrows but will listen, reflect and work harder to correct my own meddling ways. It’s easy to scoff at extreme helicopter parents, but with a little honesty, we might see a little reflection of ourselves in their hovering behavior.

So as my boys prepare to start 7th and 9th grade, I would like to thank the parents who I am trusting to shine the light on the path I vow not to follow.

Thank you for staying up until 11 pm to put the finishing touches on the diorama that you your 12-year-old made for social studies class.

Thank you for saying things like “what, we have a biology quiz tomorrow?”

Thank you for hiring a tutor to ensure that your 10th grader does not get another A- in Honors English.

Thank you for talking about college with your middle school student, and insisting that he beef up his resume with a few more extra-curricular activities. Come to think of it, thank you for having a middle school student who has a resume.

And when your 10th grader ends up on the bench in yet another soccer game, thank you for calling the coach to give her a piece of your mind.

I assure you, dear helicopter parents, I will not mind when you take up more than your allotted five minutes at your parent-teacher conference — if, that is, I have the pleasure of overhearing you explain that it was really your fault that your son’s homework was late and that he shouldn’t be penalized.

And please know that while I may shake my head at your mad dash to go back home and get the saxophone your child forgot to bring to school, I will remember your actions fondly when I am tempted to do the same.

The bell is about to toll to start the school year. So lift off, good helicopter parents. Safe flight.

But electronic communication? Momma never said anything about that.

And so I confess: I have spied on my children’s email, their text messages and Facebook chats. At first it wasn’t really spying, because I told them I would do it.  I let my oldest son have a Facebook account just before he started middle school so that he  could keep in touch with a best friend who had moved to Nepal. For nearly a year, his only Facebook friends were the kid who moved away, his mother and me. When my boys got a laptop to share, I told them that I’d do “spot checks” from time to time and that they could not close the screen or the computer when I walked into the room.  The same rule applied to their cellphones and their texts.

They didn’t really mind, because they were in that stage of development somewhere between having to narrate your every waking thought to your mother and refusing to tell her even the most mundane facts of your daily existence. And I didn’t spot-check often; life is too short to comb through how little a 12-year-old can say in eighty or ninety text messages with a friend.

When my older son started sixth grade, I went to a lecture at the middle school on internet safety. The school social worker went over the general rules  that parents should underscore with their children. She urged parents to learn about the most popular social media sites. And then she said that as children approach and enter high school, parents should not spy on their children’s texts or Facebook pages.  “It will erode your child’s trust in you,” she said, adding that teens annoyed by being spied on will probably just create new social media accounts that their parents don’t know about.

The room imploded.

Some parents looked sheepish, suddenly embarrassed about snooping around their children’s Facebook pages. Others were furious; how dare this social worker tell them not to keep tabs on what their children were doing and saying online. One indignant woman stood up and said “I pay for the computer. I pay for the phones. It’s my house, and in my house there is NO privacy until you are 18 years old!” Others said they felt they had a responsibility to protect their children from being victimized on the internet by cyber-bullies or internet predators or from getting themselves into serious trouble by sharing things they shouldn’t. Some agreed that nothing brings home the point that the internet is never truly private like knowing that Big Mother is watching.

At the time, I was a parent of a fourth-grader and a sixth-grader whose internet activity was minimal. I told myself that when they got older, I would respect their privacy. I remembered talking on the phone for hours when I was a teenager, stretching the cord across the hall and into my room and closing the door; I certainly hadn’t wanted my mother picking up and listening in. Why should I do essentially the same by looking at my sons’ written messages with friends?

And yet. It’s not that easy. Nothing, in fact, piques a parent’s curiosity — and suspicion — like having their teenager unfriend them on Facebook. Trust me, I know. Which brings me to the occasional “glancing” at a Facebook page left open on my son’s computer. I know I’m not alone — a survey earlier this year by the security software company AVG Technologies found that 60 percent of U.S. parents of teenagers have looked at their kids’ social accounts without their knowledge. And moms are most likely to be the ones doing the spying.

It’s possible that fear — of cyber-bullying, or internet predators, or the thought (gasp) of your own child sexting — is what drives parents to snoop. But I think it’s more than that. I think parents are driven by the desire to know more about a child who, in becoming an adolescent, has become frustratingly unknowable, who is so eager to push us out. How easy to just click our way back in.

My older son is starting high school in the fall. He has never been particularly open about his thoughts and feelings, but lately it seems the more I ask, the less he answers. Snooping may have seemed, at times, like a shortcut. But it’s not. I know that wherever spying takes me, it won’t take me to a trusting and honest relationship with my son. I can’t say that if I ever have a real reason to suspect he is in trouble that I won’t sacrifice his privacy. But without probable cause, I am going to have to trust that he is innocent, that all he is doing on Facebook is growing up.

What about you? Have you ever spied on your teenager? How much privacy do your children have?

Image via NancyDrewSleuth.com

Say what?

To be clear, I am not yet 50.

To be even clearer, I will not be able to say that much longer.  My friends on the Other Side tell me that in a matter of mere months I will receive my AARP membership card in the mail. Those of us in the zone of the big 5-0 know that every month counts – even if our children already consider us ancient. My older son, in an effort to convince me to renovate the bathroom he uses, told me, “when Dad and you are old and decrepit and want to move to Cape Cod, the new bathroom will be better for resale.”

I know I am old in his eyes, but I am glad to know I am not yet decrepit.

Truth be told, there are some great discussions underway at Huff Post/50. So although this may be a club that you don’t really want to belong to, please join me there anyway. You’ll find my article there, just below 5 Foods That Can Increase Your Libido.