Since I don't have any children, people are constantly asking me how to raise theirs. And if there is one thing I have figured out about kids nowadays -- mostly from what I've read in the World Weekly News and picked up one way or another in airport bars -- it's that parents are scared to death of them. The littler the kid, the more terrifying. With a 6-year-old, you're lucky if he just shoots you. If you're not lucky, he gets you in a war with Cuba.

Four kindergartners in Sayerville, for example, got suspended from school for playing cops and robbers, pointing their fingers at each other and making little ``kapow'' noises. And I applaud the school's reaction. From what I've dug up in our newspaper archives, no kindergartners in history have ever played such a game. Or maybe they did and our paper just didn't cover it, for some reason.

There is only one way to save our kids. Our parents did it, and proudly, we can surpass them. We can become insanely hypocritical.

For one thing, we can't let our kids be as stupid as we were at their age. This is essential, because we have been quite possibly the stupidest generation in history. I don't know what we did, but somehow the end result has been Adam Sandler movies and the invention of crack.

So we've got to pile more homework onto our little charges before they can think up their own bad ideas. We've already had a 50 percent increase in homework from 1981 to 1997 for children ages 3 to 11, according to a University of Michigan study released last year -- and that study was in no way influenced by having been conducted by really bitter graduate students. Then, of course, kids have to take more standardized tests now to determine whether they'll be happy and successful or end up as a bum or an editor. And if there's one thing I know for sure about kids and all this pressure, it's that this cannot in any possible way be what's making them all snap.

Then there's the problem of drugs. Remember all the things you said about marijuana when you were a teenager -- that it's not addictive, that a lot of people who smoked it could still ace a biology exam, and that you'll never get girls anyway, so who cares? Now let me ask you something: Was any of that not true?

Sure, pot is psychologically addictive. So is helium. You suck down one balloon and say something in that squeaky little voice, then you think, wait a minute, I could do something funnier, and you breath in some more and do the Smurfs performing ``Death of a Salesman.'' But you could still do better, so you take another hit and you're into this thing about Truman Capote in a diving bell, but you're not making sense anymore because, it turns out, breathing helium is not exactly the same thing as breathing oxygen.

But I've strayed from my point, which is this: There is no way you're going to tell any of this to your kids. When they ask if you ever smoked pot, you are not going to tell them about the time you and Alan Kespirski ate all those mushrooms and you had to have skin grafts after you used your sister's hairspray for a game of ``Underwater Welder.''

No, you are going to say that although most Americans your age tried marijuana, you yourself were just too busy volunteering at the hospital and composing all those symphonies. And do you know why you will say this? Because that's what Alan Kespirski is telling his kid. And you don't want to cross Kespirski, man. The guy is psycho.

But the most important thing is that, despite all the scare stories, your child will probably not kill you. Sure, he'll do a lot of other things -- soil his crib, eat all your food, disappear with your car, draw pictures of Baby Huey on his SAT test. But your child will not kill you. No, he won't.

Because death, my friend, would be too easy.