At a dinner party last week, my friend could barely contain her boredom.

“The hostess asked me if I was feeling okay,” she said. “I guess I must have been frowning. Then I looked closely and realized that I was the only woman in the room who didn’t have Botox. You can’t really tell what anyone’s feeling these days.”

Botox is not the only culprit in what seems to be a decreasing ability to express candid opinions. As far as our children are concerned, candor has been under attack for quite some time. Parents today are hesitant to communicate a full range of feelings to their children.

On the other hand, parents will go to the ends of the earth to help children identify their own feelings. At the fashionable Cozy’s Cuts for Kids uptown, I recently overheard a mother talking to her hysterical son, whose face I couldn’t see behind his thick mop of hair.

“I know you’re scared to get your hair cut, sweetie. All children are nervous when they get their hair cut,” she said soothingly. The boy – he looked about 4 years old – wailed.

“I can see you’re feeling so sad about having to get your hair cut,” she went on. “Are you worried it’s going to take a long time?”

I could barely stand listening to her. “Listen, kid, you need your hair cut,” my fantasy began. “You can’t see a thing behind that head of hair. It’ll take five minutes and that’s that.”

Of course it’s important to teach our children – when they are toddlers and when they are teenagers – to identify their own feelings. We model this behavior for our children when we tell them how proud we are when they reach out to a new student in the class, how pleased we are when they receive good grades, ribbons, and trophies.

But what about when we’re angry or disappointed or frustrated with our children? What about when their behavior is poor, their grades are below their abilities, and their decisions reflect bad judgment?

In a culture where – Botox side-effects excluded – we do our best to express our feelings, what are parents to do when our feelings aren’t positive?

Recently one of my children was acting in a way I found intolerable. He was demanding, impolite, and easy to set off into a tantrum.

At a child expert’s office, I found myself recounting the many ways I had tried to empathize aloud with him. “I told him that I could see he was having a hard time. That I knew he didn’t like being so frustrated. I told him that we could find a way for him to feel less upset, less irritated,” I recounted. “All I really wanted to tell him, though, was to just shut up.”

To my surprise, the psychiatrist told me that to tell my son to shut up wouldn’t have been such a terrible response. “Stop talking to him so much,” he told me. “You’re enabling him to go on and on.”

I was so busy validating my son’s feelings that I forgot that even more important than acknowledging his emotions is teaching him that he is responsible for his behavior.

It was only until one friend’s third child hit adolescence that she began to feel comfortable doling out criticism and honest assessments of her children.

“The thought of criticizing my kids made me so uncomfortable. It reminded me of my own childhood, and how angry I used to get at my parents for nitpicking at everything I did,” she said.

“But at some point I realized that in part, I am grateful to them for pushing me further than I might have pushed myself,” she said. “There are constructive ways to help your children see their weaknesses, to see when they could have acted differently, and there are certainly destructive ways, too.”

A mother of two teenagers says she is always trying to find the balance between being supportive and being constructively critical.

“The middle ground is elusive. You want to encourage your children 100%. But if you’re not going to tell them when they’ve blown it, who will?” she said. “Sometimes, particularly in social situations involving parties and relationships, even when they’re remorseful, they still might need to be punished,” she said.

With frowns of disapproval headed toward extinction, we parents must remember punishments. Fortunately for our children, there is no $500 injection to make them go away.

sarasberman@aol.com