The best kind of parenting study, as far as I'm concerned, is the kind that reinforces the way you've been doing things all along. Yes, you think to yourself. See? I'm not such a crappy parent after all!

Just such a study came out today in the journal Child Development: According to researchers at the University of Virginia, parents who allow their kids to disagree with them – reasonably arguing their point of view, even if it diverges from their parents' perspective – are more likely to resist peer pressure as teenagers when it comes to drug and alcohol use. "What we found was that what teens learn at home in terms of handling disagreements, they largely take into their interactions with their peers," lead author Joseph Allen told the Canadian Press. "So if they learn to be calm and confident and persuasive at home, they'll do the same thing with their peers."

Did you ever know one of those kids whose parents let them drink -- as long as it was at home? I did. The parents figured the kids would be drinking anyway. Better have them drinking under their own noses than out where they could get into trouble. That may be what was going on in Menlo Park, California, when Stanford professor Bill Burnett was arrested for allowing his teenage son and friends drink alcohol at a party he hosted.

But Bill and his wife Cynthia are saying they have no knowledge of their underaged son and his friends drinking. And the police have no proof yet. What if the parents did everything right?

1. Some schools turn a blind eye to party-hard students who violate that pesky underage drinking law. Others take it really seriously. Don’t find out the hard way and get kicked out of school and in trouble with the cops. And seriously, there are way too many people walking around with regrets from something they did when they were totally wasted.

2. While we’re on the subject, resist any and every urge to cheat, even if it’s to give someone else the answers. Academic dishonesty is a major offense — right up there with underage drinking by some administrator’s standards — so read your student manual. An honest F is much less risky than a ripped off A.  

Kids aren't supposed to die, so any death of a 13-year-old would feel tragically senseless. But the recent loss of Pennsylvania eighth-grader Brandon Rice feels especially senseless because it was a brutally painful, prolonged passing caused by just one random act. One instance of bad adolescent judgment.

Like so many other kids his age, Brandon decided to experiment with a relatively new drug, which, at the time, was fairly easy to get: Synthetic pot. Brandon smoked the synthetic pot out of a plastic Pez dispenser.

Gov. Tom Corbett signed a law banning synthetic weed in Pennsylvania a few days after Brandon smoked it out of that Pez dispenser, but it was too late. Brandon's lungs were so damaged by the chemicals in the drug (compounded, I can only imagine, by whatever toxins a Pez dispenser releases when heated) that he was put on a respirator in June.

In September, he received a double-lung transplant.

Last week, he died.

As if the story of the Texas judge caught on video beating his teenage daughter with a belt wasn't disturbing enough, in researching the man's version of corporal punishment, I've come across a trend that leaves me cold. There are parents who believe that spanking teenagers is OK because big kids make bigger mistakes.

Excuse me for going there, but say whaaaaat? If you haven't already guessed, I'm not up for spanking any kid at any age. Just last night I sat in my bathroom at 2:45 a.m. with a wailing 6-year-old. Her exhaustion had prompted a temper tantrum, and my exhaustion meant I was particularly unprepared to deal with said tantrum. You'll never guess what jumped into my head that that moment.

The word on the street is that teenagers -- no longer content to eyeball their vodka and take jello shots -- have now taken to soaking gummi bears in vodka and eating them. It's unclear how this is any more dangerous than shotgunning beers or luging Malibu, but the media is up in arms. 

A recent news story on the Boston Channel highlighted the "craze," but the joke was on them when none of the teens interviewed had ever even heard of it. "It sounds really weird," one teen replied, looking at the reporter like she was insane.

Parents are being told to be vigilant, but my guess is that the joke is on them. Besides, how drunk can a person really get from gummy bears. And even if they could get drunk from 500, how much alcohol can a gummy bear really hold?

Teenagers have been making bad decisions — and making the news — a whole heck of a lot here lately. Murdering folks. Selling drugs. Running scams. Doing sexual things in unthinkable places. Just all kinds of things to make us stop and say, “Phew, that goodness that isn’t my child.”

For many of us on the other side of headline-making stories, there’s a tendency to do plenty of tsk tsk tsking and finger wagging at not only the kids at fault, but the parents behind the crimes. They’re not doing their job. Their children have no values. They should’ve been teaching them better. That’s a whole heap of idealistic nonsense.

I've sort of been expecting someone to blame schools for introducing teenagers to the dangerous world of eating disorders. After all, parents are more than willing to blame MTV for teen pregnancy and Facebook for "letting" their kids cyberbully. But the XO Jane article titled "Health Class Taught Me How to Have an Eating Disorder" was still a tough read.

I once was that teenage girl sitting in a classroom learning that some girls lose weight by throwing up everything they eat. And yes, I would go on to battle bulimia for many years, despite the warnings that it was one of the absolute worst ways to attack the battle of the bulge. But I'm still not buying the argument that talking to our kids about tough topics is the wrong way to go. It sounds like a cop-out.