BOOMERS MISS MARK ON CHILD DISCIPLINE.

If you baby boomers are having trouble disciplining your children, it's your own fault. ``We were the Me Generation, the anti-authoritarian generation,'' Chicago psychiatrist Kenneth Kaye tells Ladies Home Journal. ``When we became parents, we wanted to be permissive; we didn't want to become the people we were rebelling against.''

Traditional roles: Our teen-agers may behave unconventionally, but they still have conventional reactions. So say Ohio State University researchers, whose study shows that sexually active teen-age girls are more likely to be depressed and feel like failures than girls who are still virgins. But sexually active boys are slightly less likely to be depressed and feel like failures than other boys.

Rx for safety: It may sometimes be a maddening nuisance for us adults, but child-resistant packaging for prescription drugs has saved hundreds of toddlers lives in the past two decades. Such packaging, mandated for oral prescription drugs since 1974, reduced accidental deaths among children 5 years and younger to two per million children in the 1990s from 3.5 per million in the 1960s, Gregory Rodgers of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reports in the Journal of the American Medical Association.