KIDS THESE DAYS:Set teens’ privacy rules in advance

The subject was privacy and how much of it we should give our kids.

A friend told me recently that on a routine trip to the garage, she saw an unusual jar in the back seat of her 17-year-old son’s car.

She picked up the jar, opened it, and smelled marijuana. There was no pot in the jar, just the strong scent. Don’t ask me how she knew.

She took the jar out of the car and confronted her son.

Caught red-handed, he volleyed with the classic kid line: “Why are you going through my things? This is an invasion of my privacy.”

Unprepared, unfortunately, my friend retreated into the “safety and consequences” speech that all kids get at one point in their lives. Some get it more often.

You know the basic elements of the speech: It’s bad for you and if you get caught you’ll be in a lot of trouble.

The trouble is that with the pot scenario, none of that is true. Oh, sure, pot is bad for you if you abuse it, but that’s true of sugar and cheeseburgers, too. And, yes, I include driving while stoned as something that is bad for you.

As for the consequences, unless her son was carrying around enough to be considered a pot dealer, the penalties are not all that great anymore. Sure, it’s still better — much better, actually — to stay away from smoking pot, but at least the laws no longer imprison the casual user.

And as I have written before, if someone put a gun to my head and told me to choose between having my kid smoke pot or drink alcohol, I’d choose the pot in a heartbeat.

But the core of my friend’s discussion, and this one, is not about marijuana, it’s about privacy.

What this weak parent failed to do was take action long before anything like the garage encounter could have occurred.

That action could be something as simple as the following conversation we have had with our kids and one that I always recommend to parents as soon as their kids become teens.

It goes like this: “As you get older, we expect you to accept more and more responsibilities. We expect you to go to school each day and work to get decent grades.

“But because you are a minor child, we are responsible for everything you do. If you break a neighbor’s window, we are responsible for repairing it. You’ll work to pay us back, of course.

“Because we carry the burden of your actions, we reserve the right to inspect anything that is in this house that belongs to you at any time. That includes your room, your car and your backpack. Everything.

“So if there is something you don’t want us to know about, you probably should stop it but you most certainly should not bring it in the house.

“Those are the rules until you are on your own.”

My wife and I have had that very conversation with our kids and thanks to my friend, are about to have it again as a refresher course on privacy.

The kid’s privacy pendulum has swung much too far in the wrong direction.

When a parent is made to feel guilty about inspecting the car of her minor child, the fox is running the henhouse.

Part of the problem these days is that too many parents want to be friends with their kids and try so hard to appease them that they forget their responsibilities to act as a gatekeeper and as the one or two people in their child’s lives who can set the firm social boundaries that kids not only need, but have indicated in poll after poll that they really want.

That’s the irony. Kids want parents to set boundaries; to tell them what is acceptable and what is not.

When they do something stupid like drive around with pot in the car (and not even hidden), they should expect and understand that there will be consequences.

Since I gave that speech to our two kids several years ago, I have not inspected either room, unless you count desperately and extensively searching my son’s room for a misplaced object about a month ago.

All I found were a bunch of candy wrappers.