There’s some good news about your teens and there's some bad. First, the good: Teens ages 13-15 exercise more than any other high-wealth nation in the world. The boys rank #1 and the girls rank #2. Yeah for the gym! The bad news: Teens are probably drunk and high while they work out. American teens rank #1 for pot smoking and #3 for binge drinking. Dude, where's my treadmill?

Have you ever looked at the bottle of hand sanitizer on your desk and wondered, "Hmm, could I get drunk by taking a few sips?" Me neither. But then I'm not a teenager!

So it should surprise absolutely no one that the ER patients who prompted California health officials to issue a warning to the world about the dangers of drinking from that bottle of cleanser were all under 20. They saw the words "contains alcohol" on the bottle, and you can guess what happened next ... glug, glug, glug.

Sigh. The sanitizer warning doesn't worry me, honestly. It's what it represents that will keep me up at night when my kid hits the teen years.

Ideally your teenager will never be exposed to drugs and never have an urge to do them. Which also means no worrying about drinking and driving, and of course this would mean that in this perfect world, your kid will never have sex until marriage. Really, ideally it would be awesome to keep your kid in a bubble for all of teenager-hood. But that's not legal.

I don't want my kids ever trying drugs. Or drinking. In fact, that will be a rule. But I'm also realistic and was a teenager once and know what goes on. But still, it's not something I want happening. Pamela Anderson, however, thinks it's okay that kids experiment with drugs.

One of the things that scares me the most about being a parent is all the pressures my kids are going to face when they become teenagers. Seriously, peer pressure? Scary stuff. I was there once; I remember. Add a driver's license, a car, and some alcohol into that mix and it's a teen drinking scenario that no parent wants to imagine.

So often we talk about how we are going to have the "sex talk" but what about the "alcohol talk"? My mom had the alcohol talk with me many times when I was younger. Yes, it often was followed with "See how your relatives get when they drink too much? Don't be like that." And I understood exactly what she meant. And never wanted to be like that.

Whoa, whoa. Try not to keel over from shock here, but I have bad news: Madonna's 15-year-old daughter Lourdes was spotted in NYC smoking a cigarette. Smoking. A. Cigarette.

Of course it's something of an unpleasant surprise to see anybody smoking in public these days, and as an under-18 years of age anybody, it's technically not even legal for Lourdes to smoke. So we can all agree on this being a not so great thing. But I've been sitting here wondering how, as a parent, I'm supposed to react -- should I be worried that more kids will start smoking now because they saw a picture of Madonna's kid smoking?

Is that really how this works?

To find out, I enlisted the help of my tween (almost 11-year-old) daughter, Charlotte.

Ah, parenting a teenager. It's so much fun, isn't it? Between the ever-present sarcasm and the utter inability to believe that their parents have anything worthwhile to say, being a parent of a teen can leave you feeling like you've been beaten to a bloody pulp.

While most of what comes out of the mouths of teens is bad enough, here are some of the worst things your teenager can tell you:

If you knew your teen was struggling with a life-threatening addiction, you would do everything in your power to get her help, right? Probably the first step would be to throw out or lock up any and all of the substance in question -- the alcohol or prescription drugs or whatever else. Especially if that substance was highly toxic even in small doses, like, say ... gasoline.

That's the first thing that jumped out at me about Shannon, the girl hooked on drinking gasoline who recently made an appearance on TLC's My Strange Addiction. She's addicted to something that's not even intended for human consumption, an addiction her mother is aware of, and still it seems no one is stopping Shannon from keeping gallons of gasoline under her bathroom sink for convenient daily access.

WHY?

This smoking ad won't scare your kidWTF, America? The Office of the Surgeon General has released a new report saying teen smoking is now at epidemic levels. Have these kids actually missed those giant pictures of blackened lungs in every school nurse's office and horrific ads on every TV channel?

This is the first youth smoking report to come out of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services since 1994, and the numbers are almost as scary as the idea of spending the rest of your life talking with a voicebox held to your throat because your throat was riddled with cancer. Seems like those scary ads are really working for us, huh?