“It’s all about leverage,” my friend and I said at the exact same time over coffee last week.

What we meant is that the extent to which we are able to control our children depends on how much leverage we have over them.

When I explained this hypothesis to a friend, a mother of three grade-school girls, she told me that any parent who denies using threats and bribes with their children is either lying or in denial. I told her that I didn’t even realize threats and bribes were parenting techniques worthy of embarrassment.

But embarrassment was certainly at the heart of my original conversation with my friend. Before we got to the leverage hypothesis, we were talking about how rude we find our children sometimes. We admitted how disgusted we were with some of the things our children do, what they dare to say to us, and how difficult it is to understand why today’s generation of children — ours occasionally included — are disrespectful and ill-mannered.

“The other night, my 11-year-old spoke to me in a tone that I never in a million years would have dreamed about using with my parents,” my friend, a mother of four, said. “I was ready to kill him. And do you want to know my husband’s response? He said, ‘He’s just tired, let’s put the kids to bed.’ Then I was ready to kill him,” she gasped.

“If I had mouthed off like that, my father would have slapped me across the face,” she continued. “I told my husband that I expected him to tell my son that he could not talk to me that way. Not that I didn’t also say that to him myself. But I expected him to be furious at my son, not busy making excuses for him.”

One mother of three thinks the increase in disrespect is linked to the increase in this generation’s ability to confide in their parents. “Kids aren’t afraid of their parents anymore,” she said. “We have swapped our children’s fearful respect for us with a feeling of closeness and the ability for our children to confide in us. I was scared of my parents, but I never would have felt comfortable talking to them about all the issues my children feel comfortable discussing with me.”

So if our children aren’t actually scared of us, how do we get them to listen to us? This is where I arrive at the leverage hypothesis. My 4-year-old has become obsessed with horses. If she begins to stall around bedtime, all I have to do is mention that I won’t be so eager to find some ponies to pet over the weekend if she doesn’t get into bed. She does, instantly.

My first-grader is happiest if I pick him up from school. When he starts digging his heels into the ground about a variety of subjects, I tell him that if he continues, I won’t pick him up from school the next day. He stops — sometimes.

With my oldest, it’s harder to find something to hold over him. Many of his peers are obsessed with computer games and PlayStations, Nintendo, and television. The most common punishment I hear doled out for third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade boys involves taking away some sort of computer privilege. While this doesn’t work with my son, I’m normally able to find something that does.

But my children are young. What happens when the gang grows up? What happens when you have little or no leverage?

“The other day I asked my son to do something he didn’t want to do,” a mother of a 14-year-old boy said. “He’s two inches taller than me. He looked down and me and slowly said no. I thought to myself, What the hell am I supposed to do now?’ This is when that little phrase becomes handy: ‘Just wait till Daddy gets home.'”

My friends with teenagers, even card-carrying feminists, say when it comes to their adolescent children, they are not above saying anything and that many of them do find themselves invoking daddy.

“Sometimes when I mention my husband, my daughter rolls her eyes,” a mother of two teenagers said. “She knows that the last thing he wants to do is be the bad guy. That said, she is more likely to listen to him, but I think that’s really a function of the fact that he doesn’t have to deal with 90% of the daily garbage that I do.”

“The key is hoping that there is a very short window of time between when your leverage wears out and your teenager’s reasoning kicks in,” a mother of three teenagers said. “Because if that window’s too long, you’re in deep trouble.”

sarasberman@aol.com