Dear Dr. Wes & Jenny: I have on occasion allowed my 16-year-old son and his friends to drink at our home. I am a single mom and have started dating a man from another town. This came up in a discussion we were having about our kids and he was really upset that I would do this. I am worried that if these kids don’t have a safe place to party, then they will be involved in drunken driving. I know a young man who died this way. Besides, I feel like I can regulate things better if they are in our home and they’ll learn to drink responsibly that way. So far it hasn’t been a problem. — Mother

Dr. Wes: I agree with the guy you’re dating — it’s more serious than you realize. Your concerns are valid. However, the solution is not to condone the partying by allowing it to come off at your home. There are more reasons for this than we have space to print.

First of all you are committing a crime, punishable in Kansas by six months in jail, even if you do not directly provide the alcohol. This law was passed in 2003 after a 17-year-old boy died in a car crash after drinking at an adult-supervised house party.

Beyond this, you are sending very mixed messages to your son and his friends about your beliefs on underage drinking, not one that reinforces responsible behavior.

Finally, you should remember that you are not raising kids for today or tomorrow. You are raising them for a lifetime. I’m sure they see you as the cool mom right now, but when they are 25 and need to think like adults, they will recall that you violated this boundary and they will feel freer to violate boundaries themselves.

I realize the risk you are taking by denying the drinking at home — they very well might take it somewhere less safe. But I think you have to deal with this by contracting to require designated drivers, and to bring your son home whenever he calls and tells you that he is unsafe to drive. And if this becomes more than a very rare occurrence, you need to entertain the notion that he has a real drinking problem. It will not be easy to change course at this point, but you need to find a way. In the end, it is your kid’s job to make mistakes and get into trouble. It is the parent’s job to dish out the consequences. Only through that process do responsible adults emerge.

Jenny: I agree that it isn’t the best idea in the world to let your teenage son have free reign on drinking at home with his friends. It’s providing a safe haven for a bad habit. You may be breaking the habit of drinking and driving but you are creating a sense of false security by allowing them to drink illegally in your household.

You also are teaching them that it’s OK to break the law just as long as they don’t get caught. They will eventually try to get away with more and more in your household.

You may be considered the “cool mom” but you will loose all authority and your child will grow up under misdirection of irresponsibility. From what I’ve seen, even the police are being more lenient upon teens than they have been in the past. I just don’t want this to wind up like the case of teen girls in Illinois last year who maliciously beat up a group of other girls during a powder-puff football game. What people don’t remember is the fact that kegs of beer were provided to the teens by their parents during this event.

People don’t realize the ease with which teens get alcohol and how many lenient parents give their children alcohol. Parents are becoming less focused on raising their children the right way and too focused on making their children happy and avoiding whining, even if it damages them in the long run.

Wes Crenshaw is board certified in Family Psychology and director of the Family Therapy Institute Midwest in Lawrence. Jenny Kane is a senior at Free State High School. Opinions and advice given are not meant as a substitute for psychological evaluation or therapy services.