KEY POINTS:
My sisters and I used to love to dance when we were teenagers. It made no difference to us whether it was at a sober Samoan wedding in a brightly-lit school hall, or a crowded, darkened nightclub.
We could always be trusted to be the first on the
dance floor. We were such show-offs.
And, by today's standards, complete innocents. We went to nightclubs to dance, and be seen and admired, rather than to meet boys - though we liked them well enough. We just wanted to have fun.
The thing that would amaze my teenaged daughter and many of her friends today is that we managed to do it all on Fanta and Coke.
It never occurred to us that we could have enhanced the experience with alcohol or other mind-altering drugs (this was something I learned much later, a little too well for my own good).
Of course, it's a different story for the over-stimulated, over-indulged and over-exposed Bebo generation to which my children belong.
Researchers tell us how different their world is compared to the one we inhabited. Apartheid and the Berlin Wall were long gone by the time my children were old enough to google them on the internet, words that didn't exist when I was a teenager.
It's not only the landscape that's changed, but the language - texts and mobiles have different meanings now and so, many say, does childhood. Thanks to the pervasive influence of popular culture, our children grow up frighteningly fast.
I can't help wanting to slow down the pace at which our children are propelled, even fast-tracked, into adulthood by social, cultural and commercial forces. Children grow up too fast, and, I sometimes think, too hard. I meet teenagers sometimes who are so cynical and worldly they make me want to weep.
And we keep lowering the bar, blurring the lines between childhood and adulthood.
A while back, my daughter and I tried to plan her 16th birthday party. She wanted a cocktail party for 30 or so of her closest friends. I thought she meant "mocktails" - the non-alcoholic kind. No, she said, the real thing. She'd had some at another friend's 16th birthday party, and liked them.
And no, she said, seeing the look on my face, nobody got drunk, because the drinks weren't very strong, and it was adult-supervised.
Still, I couldn't remember seeing the parental warning about alcohol in the party invitation (and I couldn't help thinking sympathetically of moves in parts of the US to prosecute parents who serve alcohol to under-aged children other than their own).
My daughter thinks I should trust her good sense when she's invited to parties where alcohol is invariably served, but she's 17, and I know too much about the effects of alcohol on developing young brains - not to mention ageing brains.
Once, she argued that she needed to have a couple of drinks because everyone else was doing it and it would make the party "more fun".
Tough, I told her. If being with her friends wasn't fun enough without alcohol, she might as well stay home. But at a time when peer pressure is supposed to pose the greatest risk, it's not my daughter's peers who worry me.
Teenagers aren't the only ones who've been conditioned to find it hard to imagine good times without artificial stimulation. The pursuit of pleasure, even if chemically-induced, has become an inalienable right that we seldom stop to question.
Party pills are a case in point. They came on the scene in 2000, without their manufacturers ever having to prove their safety, and since then, according to one survey, they've become the fourth most widely used drug in New Zealand - after alcohol, tobacco and cannabis.
Those opposed to the Government bill to ban them argue that young people will do drugs anyway, so why not give them something which isn't as harmful?
(Why do we have such high expectations of our children when it comes to education, but hardly any when it comes to alcohol, drugs and sex?)
Party pills, the argument goes, will keep young people away from harder drugs, but a recent Victoria University study suggests that almost three-quarters of party pill users also use illegal drugs. And according to the police, it's getting harder to tell the difference between the two, with many pills containing methamphetamine and other substances.
I can understand the party-pill pushers trying to protect their thriving $35 million a year industry. But I have some difficulty with those who are supposed to be protecting the rest of us.
We agonise over the presence of harmful additives in our food, but seem quite happy to allow young people to swallow pills containing a psychoactive ingredient, BZP, originally introduced as a working agent in agriculture.
