Barry - My teenage sons goal in life is to make me feel 3,500 years old: and other thoughts on parenting from Dave Barry

P arenthood is not unlike the Space Mountain ride at Disney World, in the sense that both experiences involve zooming along in a carefree manner, then suddenly having your stomach get collapsed like a stomped-on Dixie cup by violent unexpected high-speed turns.

T imes have changed. I found this out the night of my sons first dance party, when, fifteen minutes before it was time to leave for the party, he strode impatiently up to me, wearing new duds, looking perfect in the hair department, and smelling vaguely ofCan it be? Yes, its Right Guard and told me that we had to go immediately or wed be late. This from a person who has never, ever shown the slightest interest in being on time for anything, a person who was three weeks late to his own birth .

W hen we get to the tax form question about how much, exactly, we spent on child care, we are going to have some questions of our own, including: What about Captain Skyhawk? Captain Skyhawk is a Nintendo game that I purchased for my son for Christmas because I am a bad parent who wishes to rot his mind. It cost $41.99, and I definitely view that as a child-care expense.

M y son, who is eleven, has started going to dance parties. Only minutes ago he was this little boy whose idea of looking really sharp was to have all the Kool-Aid stains on his He-Man T-shirt be the same flavor; now, suddenly, hes spending more time per day on his hair than it took to paint the Sistine Chapel.

I know how we can solve our national crisis in educational funding: Whenever the schools needed money, they could send a letter to all the parents, saying, Give us a contribution right now, or were going to hold a Science Fair. Theyd raise billions.

Y our Prom magazine (published by Modern Bride ) is chock-full of prom advice and glossy color promwear advertisements featuring models who look exactly like what high school students would look like if they were all professional models and resembled Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts and didnt have acne.

M y son is going to parties where the boys dance with actual girls. This was unheard of when I was eleven, during the Eisenhower administration. Oh, sure , our parents sent us to ballroom-dancing class, but it would have been equally cost-effective for them to simply set fire to their money.

T he computer is a great teaching tool for young people. For example, my home computer has an educational program that enables you to control an entire simulated planetits ecology, its technology, its weather, etc. My ten-year-old son and his friends use this program a lot, and weve all learned some important ecological lessons, the main one being never, ever put ten-year-old boys in charge of a planet (Lets see what happens when you have volcanoes and nuclear war!).

I was a counselor at a place called Camp Sharparoon. My group, consisting of nine-year-old boys, went by the Indian name Schaghticokes (pronounced SCAT-a-cooks), which I believe is the Indian word for boys who are too scared to go out to the latrine in the woods at night. On camping trips our primary wilderness pioneer activity was hanging blankets out to dry, the result being that there was no wildlife for two hundred miles downwind of our campsite.

M y high school had a strict dress code, administered by Mr. Sabella, who enforced it by picking offenders up by their necks and shaking them like deceased chickens. Schools today have much looser dress codes, something like Students must wear clothes, unless they have an excuse. You see every dress style: Surfer, Preppy, Hippie, Intellectual, Bimbette, Cheerleader, Jockstrap, Punk, and Young Felon of Tomorrow, to name just a few. Sitting in the Palmetto High School office, Im admiring the haircut of a young man who is virtually bald on the left side of his head and has shoulder-length hair on the right. Im wondering what administrative technique Mr. Sabella would have used on this young man. Probably firearms.

M y sons new sneakers cost approximately as much as an assault helicopter but are more technologically advanced. They are the heavily advertised sneakers that have little air pumps inside. This feature provides an important orthopedic benefit: It allows the manufacturer to jack the price up. Also it turns the act of walking around into a highly complex process. Wait! my son will say, as were rushing off to school, late as usual. I have to pump more air into my sneakers! Because God forbid you should go to school underinflated.

W aves of students are surging in and out of the high schools main office, trying to find out which rooms theyre supposed to go to. This is determined by a complex schedule apparently designed so that, whenever the bell rings, every student in the school has to bump into every other student to get to the next class.

T he Halloween of 1978, the community where I lived decided to hold a party where the neighborhood children would have some traditional Halloween fun such as bobbing for apples, the theory being that theyd do less traditional Halloween property damage if their lungs were full of water.

I have done a detailed scientific survey of several other parents, and my current estimate is that sneakers now absorb 83 percent of the average U.S. family income. This has to stop. We need Congress to pass a law requiring the sneaker industry to return to the system we had when I was growing up, under which there was only one kind of sneakers, namely U.S. Keds, which were made from Army surplus tents and which cost about $10, or roughly $1 per pound.

B abies want to put everything in the entire world except food into their mouths. As far as babies are concerned, the sole function of the world is to provide objects for them to drool on.

I f you let your baby continue to stick things into his or her mouth, he or she will have a hard time later in life. I mean, suppose your child goes to a major Wall Street law firm for a job interview, and ends up putting all the waiting-room magazines and ashtrays in his or her mouth. He or she would make a poor impression, and would end up having to be a bum or work for the government.

T hese days theyre not allowed to show violence on television except on Saturday-morning cartoon shows for children aged five and under. The rest of us are stuck with TV talk shows in which people drone on endlessly about sex but never actually do anything on the screen. After watching these shows for a few hours, viewers tend to get bored and go out on the street and commit acts of violence.

M any of you young persons out there are seriously thinking about going to college. (That is, of course, a lie. The only things you young persons think seriously about are loud music and sex. Trust me: These are closely related to college.)