A nationwide survey released last month suggests that many parents who grew up in the era of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll may have fried more brain cells back then than they realize.

Either that, or they’re simply unwilling to learn from their own experiences during their party-hearty teen-age years.

The 11th annual survey conducted by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found that parents’ perceptions about what goes on at typical teen-age parties is seriously at odds with the reality. While half of the teens surveyed said that alcohol, drugs or both are often available at the parties they attend, a shocking 80 percent of the parents said they believed their kids were going to substance-free parties.

In the survey, 98 percent of parents said they are normally present during the parties they allow their children to have at home, but a third of teens report that parents are rarely or never present during the parties they go to regularly. And although 99 percent of parents said they would never serve alcohol at their teen-agers’ parties, nearly 30 percent of kids said they have been at parent-supervised parties where alcohol was available.

“Too many parents fail to fulfill their responsibility to chaperone their kids’ parties,” remarked Joseph A. Califano, the center’s chairman and president and former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. “They have no idea how drug-and-alcohol-infested their teens’ world is. The denial, self-delusion and lack of awareness of these parental palookas put their children at enormous risk of drinking and using illegal and prescription drugs.”

I’m not sure exactly what Califano means by “palooka,” which my dictionary defines as a clumsy or oafish fellow, but the parents in the survey could be faulted for being woefully out of touch with the world at a time when paying close attention has never been more important to the welfare of their kids.

If they honestly don’t know about all the intoxicating temptations their kids face these days, or for some reason have completely forgotten what parties were like when they were growing up in the free-for-all 1970s, then what else are they ignorant of in their teen-agers’ lives?

Perhaps these are the same parents who haven’t a clue about what their 13-year-olds are up to, let’s say, when they sit alone at their computers in their rooms for hours every night. The same parents who haven’t taken the time to familiarize themselves with the allure of chat rooms, of what Instant Messaging is all about, what a buddy list is and what names are on it. The same parents who have yet to learn, whether through laziness or naivete or indifference, the first thing about a little phenomenon called MySpace that may be playing an enormous role in the social lives of their teen-agers.

If these parents don’t know about the booze and drugs their kids are being exposed to, perhaps they also have yet to read a single news story about all the sexual predators out there in cyberspace who are constantly on the prowl for unwitting new victims – kids just like their very own children.

“There is a terrible disconnect,” said Califano of the survey results, a conclusion borne out dramatically in one especially revealing sample question: While 27 percent of young respondents said they view drugs as their greatest concern, only 12 percent of the parents felt the same about the teens they were raising.