“It’s so much easier being a kid,” the priest insisted.

“Nooooo,” protested a few of the children who had assembled near the altar before their weekly children’s mass at our church yesterday morning.

“If you turn around, I’ll bet you’ll find a lot of people who disagree,” he said. The kids turned around, and the grown-ups sitting in the pews laughed.

“Do you work? Do you cook? Do you clean?” he asked. “I’ll bet you make a mess,” he chuckled, before handing the Bible over to one of the little boys to carry as the group wandered to the room in the back of the church.

Is it easier being a kid? I dunno. Sure it’s easier not having to pay the mortgage or make sure there’s enough milk in the fridge, but I can eat cookies before dinner and go on any web site I feel like, but my kids can’t. Not without retribution, anyhow. And I don’t have to do algebra (yuck) or put on musty shorts in the middle of the day and run around the track behind the school if I don’t feel like it.

Best of all, I don’t have to go through puberty again.

Now that I’m well into adulthood, if I had a year to live over again, I’d choose when I was nine. That’s the year I started playing soccer, I helped my brother build a tree fort, and I went to summer camp where I won Indian Leg Wrestling contests. (I know… it was 1976 and we didn’t know any better then). Best of all, it was before puberty came and ruined it all.  Bras, periods, boys. Blah.

But it was also the year when the boys’ gym teacher gave my friend Paula and me grief because we chose the option to play soccer with the boys rather than field hockey with the girls. (No slapshots? What’s the point?) And it was the year that one of my brother’s friends peed on my head from our tree fort above me. Yes: On. My. Head.

If I was a grown-up, I’d have retribution for both acts of injustice. But I was nine (and it was the 70’s before anti-bullying rules and when Title IX still ticked quite a few men off) and there wasn’t much I could do about it. Despite all that, it was a good year, perhaps because adulthood wasn’t looming.

I wonder if enough has changed to make childhood easier on kids.

As I drove a group of boys to the lake to swim after school on Friday, I listened to them talk about the fifth grade puberty video they had seen that day in school:

“They’d say something great — ‘You’ll grow big and strong’ — and then say something bad — ‘You’ll have body odor’,” announced one of the boys. “Hey, you’ll be strong, but you’ll smell!” he added to laughter from the other boys. Then to accentuate his point, he began singing, “Every rose has its thorn…”

Is it easier being a kid? Maybe. Maybe not. I suppose it depends on the kid, the parents, the school and whether or not the boy who lives down the street wants to pee on your head when you’re just trying to go home and sneak a cookie before dinner.

Share, share: Do you think it’s easier being a kid?

It seems like yesterday he was a trick or treater in the Halloween parade. At least, I think that's him.

When I was 14, I gave my mother hell. For an entire year, I moped, I sulked, I whined and then I bought a Walkman (remember those?) and listened to REO Speedwagon (remember them?) while I stared out the car window without a word.

My brother did no such thing when he was a teenager. Instead, he slept, mainly because he grew eight inches in one year until he reached his final destination of 6 foot 2. (Not coincidentally, I didn’t provoke him as much after that.)

My firstborn is just 24 hours into his teen years and there’s no telling which way he’ll go. He’s much more like his uncle was at 13 than I was, so my money is on the sleeping thing. I’m actually hoping this is so, because there are many more ways teens can cause their parents grief these days. And though my son is a good kid and I’m confident that all the parenting my husband and I have done to date will help us all through the next seven years, it’s going to be harder to continue to be his filter than it was for my parents to be mine.  Why? Because of the 3 Reasons Parenting Teens in the 21st Century Makes Me Want to Scream:

1. Bypassing Parents Through Technology: If a boy wanted to get a hold of me at home, he’d have to call and talk first to my father, who answered the phone with a bark, as though you were annoying simply for thinking of starting a conversation with anyone in our house. It was kind of frightening, even to me. Nowadays, kids can bypass the scary dad or nosy mom by texting or IMing, effectively throwing out the Middle Mom or Dad in the exchange.
2. Sexting:While I’m certain my parents probably don’t want to know what went on on stage at the Billy Idol concert at the Passaic Theater in 1984, at least none of my classmates ever shared naked photos of themselves with me, largely because that would have required getting film developed at the local Walgreen’s, who would notify the authorities. But today’s teens — young ones barely old enough to get into Rated PG-13 movies — are sending each other photos of various naked body parts or the Full Monty. And what 13-year-old boy doesn’t dream of having his own collection of boob photos?
3. Teen Girls Can Be Predatory: It used to be that girls were the gatekeepers of all things sexual, but today, not so much. Case in point: Recently, a group of girls tried to lure my son’s classmate to the movies, telling him that other boys would be there. Turns out, they wanted him all to themselves — no other boys allowed. Luckily, his mother intercepted the text invitation and called other mothers to vet the information. I warned my son: “Some girls are like cats [or maybe "hyenas"], and you’re the mouse. Let’s make sure they don’t rip your tail off and kick you around the kitchen floor.” These days, boys need to be taught defense, lest they wind up with an STD and/or a baby before they leave high school or compromising photos of him posted on Facebook, where his mother hangs out.

My teenager is one of the few kids in his grade without a cell phone. So far he neither needs it, nor wants it, but that will change soon enough. He has no interest in Facebook (see: Hangs Out, Mom), and as far as I know, no catlike girls have eyed up his tail.  But it’s early – he’s only been 13 since yesterday. I know I’ll have to be extra diligent and I’ll have to create rules my parents never had to think about for things they never had to think about, like privacy filters, webcams and collections of classmates’ boob photos.

But I got 100% correct on this teen slang questionnaire, and there’s no shortage of advice for parenting teens on the Internet. So I’ll take a deep breath and take it as it comes while I secretly hope he’ll sleep through his teens.

Got teens? Check out our Radical Parenting blog by Vanessa Van Petten, author of “You’re Grounded” and creator of the iCurfew app for the iPhone, and our Buzz on the Birds and Bees blog by Dr. Melanie Davis.

Share, share, that’s fair: Is parenting teens really harder these days? Share your warnings and your well wishes.

He was good back then. Still is.

I was hoping that nobody at the middle school would realize that I was spying on my son. I’d just followed the junior kindergarten bus to school, and I was hiding next door at the middle school, watching my first-born, Nicholas, get off the bus.

Loser.

I didn’t want to be a helicopter mom, but if you knew how much hand-wringing I’d gone through before making the decision to put my son into junior kindergarten, our school system’s program for children who aren’t quite ready for the rigors of a competitive kindergarten (a.k.a. boys), you’d understand. He was the oldest kid in the program and, according to the principal, he really only needed half-a-year, but there was no such thing. As a result, the decision was much harder than I’d anticipated.

So I followed the bus to school. But when I watched the teacher greet him at the door as though a long-lost friend had just shown up after being missing at sea for months, I relaxed. In fact, I almost napped in the middle school parking lot. 

Loser.

I was in that parking lot again this weekend, only this time, I wasn’t following my son. Rather, I was dropping him off at the Teen Canteen, along with his friend, Drew. We were a little early, and though we could see there were people in the gym when we drove around the back of the school, the parking lot near the front entrance was empty except for a lone police car awaiting the onslaught of drop-offs.

Nick and Drew hopped out of my car and tried to open the doors by the main office, but they were locked. So they decided to test out all the doors until they’d found one that opens.

“If we don’t come back, we’re good,” he said. And then in his typical, nearly-a-teen, deadpan sarcasm added, “Or dead.” Then they ran off into the night toward the far doors and didn’t return. I assumed they were good.

And so was I. It’s time for the Teen Canteens. It’s time for the drop-offs. It’s time for wondering whether he needs a cell phone and for buying him a watch with an alarm on it so I no longer have to wake up “Frankenteen” on school days. Maybe I don’t dread the teen years because it took us an extra school year to get here. Or maybe it’s just high time for the next stage, the years where I sit in the school parking lot staring at the far doors for just a moment too long before deciding to leave.

When I told a friend of mine that Nicholas is nearing his thirteenth birthday, she warned, “Oh, my son turned on a dime pretty much days before he hit 13.” Her normally sweet boy quickly became a sullen teen, and the dynamic of their relationship changed until he got older and more agreeable. She talked to him, and he grunted back, if she was lucky.

I hear these horror stories of good teens gone bad, of the hormones holding the house hostage, of the sunshine of your life raining on your parade, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it will happen to him, to us. Maybe not. I know I put my mother through a year of hell when I was 14, but my brother sailed through his teen years with little fuss. You never know. All I know for sure is that at least I’m not following school buses anymore.

If you’d been raised where I was, when I was, you’d understand. It’s not personal. It’s Springsteen.

I have no doubt that your classroom will look wonderful for Back-to-School Night, adorned with the kids’ work and your vision of the year ahead in your fifth grade class. But I won’t be there.

Instead, I’ll be at Giants Stadium, singing the words to “Thunder Road” with 60,000 other middle-aged New Jerseyans , many of whom no doubt were there with me doing the very same thing back in 1984, only with less fat, fewer wrinkles and more energy.

That’s right: I’ve opted to be a New Jersey cliche instead of a conscientious mother. And I know I’m not the only one, as I’ve been a bad influence on other parents who should be at Back-to-School Night as well. I apologize to their kids’ teachers.

But take heart: We’re going to the concert in my mini-van. Plus, we’re going to scream and high-five each other when Bruce plays “Jungleland,” and we’re going to sway side-to-side, holding hands, while we sing along to “Workin’ on a Dream.” We going act like we’re 17 again, and it won’t be pretty. I’ll try to get a photo for you.

So, please send home whatever cute letter my son is writing to me in class today, and I will write back to him in the morning. I might feel a little pang that he won’t find it on his desk when he gets to school, it’s true. But perhaps that will be better payback than the vision of me hanging out my mini-van window shouting, “Bruuuuuuuce!” in the parking lot at the Meadowlands.

Or maybe you fully understand where I’m coming from. In that case, I’ll never speak of this again…unless, of course, you have tickets for Saturday night’s concert. Call me for the set list tomorrow.

Sincerely,

Jen Singer

Case in point:

At some point during a camping trip this past spring, my Boy Scout got hot. So, he unzipped the bottom part of the legs of his official Boy Scouts pants, thereby turning them into shorts.

Both bottoms of the pants miraculously made it home and into the wash, where one was promptly lost. And yet, he has two legs, and winter is coming.

Personally, I believe these types of pants should be outlawed  — at least in children’s sizes or until my son does all his own laundry.

Shortly after soccer season ended in the spring, my other son put his green soccer socks into the wash, where one was promptly lost. Which makes me wonder: Why not two? Why do we always lose one?

Anyhow, I’ve given up on finding the matching sock and have ordered another pair, which I hope very much will arrive prior to his first game in two weeks because Sports Authority doesn’t sell green soccer socks. Blue, white, black and red, yes. But not green.

And yet, it should come as no surprise that I am in this predicament. After all, I can’t find the match to this sock, which was a gift from the nice folks at the off-Broadway play “Secrets of a Soccer Mom,” where I’d signed books. If I can lose one very large, very royal blue sock with jumbo lettering that brings to mind the famous “Hollywood” sign, how can I be trusted with a much smaller green sock and the bottom of boys pants?

And where is that in the back-to-school guides? Nowhere, just like our missing items.

He’s home this week on “bed rest” (a.k.a. playing his Nintendo DS on the couch in yesterday’s sweats), because he suffered an eye injury at his soccer game on Sunday. Apparently, the eyeball cannot kick a soccer ball, even when an opposing player tries to see if yours can.

So far, he hasn’t complained that he’s bored. But then, he’s got Haagen Dazs and Speed Racer. How can you get bored with that? Or with hours and hours of Pokemon battles? And with half the kids out of school with influenza and nothing but rain, rain, rain, rain around here, he knows he’s not missing much, anyhow.

Adults could learn a lot from my son. When we grown-ups take “sick days,” all too often we spend them checking e-mail, catching up on laundry and generally doing all the stuff we normally do, only more slowly and with wads of tissues in our pockets.

But the next time you’re sick, stock up on the ice cream (dark chocolate covered vanilla bean pops) and the Speed Racer (or more likely, Tivoed Real Housewives of New Jersey) episodes, and do what my son is doing: Take a sick day. A real sick day. It just might make you feel better.

With 20% of kids out sick from school yesterday, I can only imagine that after a weekend of soccer and baseball games, barbecues, birthday parties and picnics, that number has risen today. Take your pick:

Behind Door #1 is strep throat.

Behind Door #2 is a mysterious high fever with few other symptoms.

Behind Door #3 is Swine Flu. Yes, that Swine Flu, which is why I’ve used capital letters for it. It seems appropriate given the look of panic it creates on many a parent’s face.

Only the school’s web site assures frantic parents that it’s “mild in nature.” I know of at least three kids who have tested positive with influenza, some of it H1N1 (aka Swine Flu), and their symptoms aren’t too bad. It’s the 7-day quarantine at home that’s driving them — and their parents — crazy.

It’s one thing to miss out on a week of school in the dead of winter, when the teacher is droning on about quadrangles and run-on sentences and it’s sleeting outside, and quite another at the end of the school year when there are gorgeous days filled with water balloon fights, class trips and yet another parent showing up at school with all the fixings for ice cream sundaes.

I heard a rumor at the bus stop today (by the only other parent who was standing in the pouring rain with me) that they’ll close the school if we get to a 33% absentee rate. And then, I suppose, that they’ll make up those days in — dare I say — July.

I’m going to stock up on water balloons and ice cream sundae fixings, just in case.