NEW YORK (RNS) My heart chilled when I read about teenagers who gather on the Great Lawn of Central Park and flaunt laws against underage drinking.

Many attend the independent schools lining the park, including the school from which my 18-year-old son just graduated.

Yes, my son grimaced, he knows all about these kids. They are 11 to 14 years old. They walk onto the lawn carrying six-packs of beer. They buy margaritas for $5 from a young man who works the crowd with a white cooler.

Their obnoxious behavior is driving older teens like my son away from the Great Lawn. The last straw came when Margarita Man saw cops coming and hid among my son’s friends (not his customers), thereby putting them at risk in any ensuing bust.

At a Faith & Addiction conference that I coordinated last week, a speaker from Partnership for a Drug-Free America said that half of the nation’s more than 22 million active addicts are younger than 30. A growing number are teenagers. Parents are dangerously clueless about the alcohol and drugs flowing into the lives of children ages 9 to 17.

The keynote speaker, Teresa McBean, of the Richmond, Va.-based NorthStar Community, said alcohol and drugs (including marijuana cigarettes laced with heroin) are flooding local schools. “(Experts) tell us that, if nothing changes, America won’t have a capable work force in 20 years,” she said.

As a former teenager myself, I know that it is a solemn duty of youth to irritate and worry grown-ups. I also know that kids grow up, and their adolescent fascination with danger fades.

Yet it seems truly worrisome to have an entire generation entering adulthood with an addiction, bodies bloated by junk food, inadequate skills for holding a job, or self-esteem crushed by self-absorbed parents.

These aren’t deficits that maturity will erase. Like years lost to imprisonment, these deficits can have permanent consequences: low graduation rates, higher likelihoods of incarceration, lower lifetime earnings and the myriad negative consequences of addiction, ranging from depression to premature death.

Moreover, deficits carried from adolescence into adulthood are a setup for predators who are already waiting. Look at the payday loan shops and used-car hucksters that ring military bases, preying on the underpaid and anxious. Look at debt-settlement firms that pounce when debts accumulated while trying to maintain yesterday’s unaffordable lifestyle get high.

Look at expensive colleges that steer students into the clutches of debt merchants, and financial institutions that have discovered it’s more profitable to prey on their customers than to serve them.

The young man who prowls the Great Lawn selling margaritas to middle schoolers is just an early introduction to a predator-run economy.

Who is going to curb the predators? That should be our question.

We parents need to start by reclaiming adolescence as basically a safe and survivable condition. Being clueless and career-driven parents simply cannot excuse damage being done to our kids. This isn’t 1964 or 1984. Parents need to get smart and push back.

A recent epidemic of cyberbullying in a New Jersey middle school is a sobering reminder, because parents apparently aren’t taking action, such as canceling their kids’ Blackberrys and confronting the bullies’ parents.

Parents, faith leaders and community leaders must join forces against the predators — even when doing so gets in the way of work.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)