A friend’s son was late to school this week. It wasn’t the first time. He was often a few minutes behind schedule in the morning.

The teacher pulled aside the mother and laid into her.

“Why are you shouting at me?” my friend asked the teacher. “If you want to yell at someone, you should be talking to my son. He’s the one who drags his feet each morning.”

“I felt like I really sold him out,” my friend said later. “But at least now he races to get to school on time each morning.”

While it is parents who are most often accused of overprotecting their children, these days the schools aren’t far behind. Is it because schools don’t believe it’s their role to chastise pupils – or is it because they’re worried about offending parents?

“It’s so much more effective if a warning or consequence is doled out by the school than it is if it’s made by the parent,”said a mother of three children who attend two different private schools. “But schools these days don’t want to upset their students. Then they’re left fielding phone calls from angry parents who think their children are angels.”

Where does that leave the rest of us who know our children are hardly angelic? Most parents I spoke to want their children’s schools to lay down the law. Most – particularly those with teenagers – also feel that it would be easier to keep their own children in line if the school’s policies were clear, if punishments were doled out when infractions were incurred, and if teachers and administrators were authoritative.

“I view school as my children’s job. I want them to respect their bosses,” a mother of three said. “I want them to be scared of the consequences of not doing well, or of breaking a rule. And I don’t want them just to be scared of the consequences at home. Of course discipline is a parent’s job, but it is also a school’s job. And I don’t think they’re doing such a great job these days.”

One school head said parents who understand the need for a school to be strict aren’t usually the ones with children who need discipline.

“When we have parents on board, we are best able to help children, particularly those who need a firm hand. But you’d be surprised, or maybe you wouldn’t be, to find out that it’s the parents of the children who desperately need to be disciplined, that are the most upset when the school tries to intervene, or even when a teacher just yells at their kid,” she said.

A friend who has two sons at a famously nurturing all-boys school on the Upper East Side told me a child was recently suspended from school for the day.

“When the child returned the following day, he bragged that he had spent the entire day with his mother at the movies,” she said. “From then on, for ‘minor’ infractions, the school head was inclined to have in-school suspensions since at least in school she knew the child was being ‘punished.'”

Plenty of parents understand the predicament surrounding school administrators and many of them are aware of the schools’ change in tone from when they were children, from commanding to conciliatory.

“I think teachers don’t want to upset parents, particularly when they are paying $25,000 a year,” one mother said. “Parents’ attitudes have changed to one of paying customers. I think we are also in a society today where schools are so afraid of getting sued, or of having a bad rap, that they just look the other way,”

And in New York, how could we forget about money? A parent who is also an alumna at an elite co-ed school on the Upper East Side said the children of her school’s big donors get treated differently when trouble brews.

“The school has much more at stake when a big donor’s kid gets in trouble. What’s a school to do when a kid has plagiarized, or just stolen a test, but their parents have just donated a new gymnasium? Of course, it’s the kid who really suffers from any kind of leniency. Whatever punishment is going to be doled at 16 is nothing compared to what’s to come at 26,” she said.

For many parents, having a mark on their child’s record at 16 is still too damaging.

“Parents worry about how their children will get into college if failures and suspensions begin to show up on their record,” the school head told me. “I try to explain that their child will still get into some college and that now’s the time to send a message about what is and what is not acceptable behavior. But often my message falls on deaf ears.”

sarasberman@aol.com