Sitting barefoot and Indian-style in white linen pants on a couch in Aquinnah, Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair recaps How Can You Be a Go-To Parent (or Grandparent)?, a package of parenting advice she shared Thursday evening at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center in Vineyard Haven. The event, part of the Summer Institute’s speaker series, drew the 55-year-old clinical and consulting psychologist from her home in Boston’s Chestnut Hill for a talk with Vineyarders concerned about raising children and teenagers in an age of hyperconnectivity between youngsters and their peers and increasing disconnect between children and their guardians.

“Watch TV with your children. Listen to their music, watch their shows, join them,” she says. “Kids love it when they have a one-on-one relationship with whomever — grandmother, grandfather, mother, father. And there are still great shows to watch — Lost or Gossip Girls. Parents should definitely tune in. Not in a judgmental way, but to be curious together. Use it as an opportunity to connect and to converse.”

Dr. Steiner-Adair says that youngsters today value the comfort, advice and companionship of their grandparents more than previous generations.

“Grandparents have an amazing opportunity to teach their grandchildren about what makes a good long-term relationship, what is a good sequence for discovering yourself sexually, how to recover from the absolutely expectable mistakes you make along the way, how to be a resilient person,” she says.

Dr. Steiner-Adair encourages parents to arm themselves with tools like these for reconnecting during a time when technology and the media are contributing to the normalization of secrecy, sex, drinking and drugs among youngsters. Eighth graders, she says, are lying, cheating, experimenting sexually and taking shots of Jolly Rancher-flavored vodka — all risky behaviors that used to emerge in teens during the final years of high school.

Yet while Dr. Steiner-Adair urges communicative relationships between parents and children, she says it is important that parents avoid becoming too chummy with their kids.

“Parenting means that you have to be able to tolerate your children being furious, hating you in the moment,” she says, adding: “Clueless parents like to be best friends with their kids. When I hear a parent say, ‘Oh, my son and I are best friends’ — sometimes that can be true in a nice way and a healthy way, but kids’ best friends should be their peers ... because being a best friend means condoning behavior that is part of the peer culture. And in an understandable desire to try to be close to their children, some parents lose sight of the important parental function.”

Parents she dubs “clueless” abandon their role as protector. Often, they want to remain uninformed about their child’s peer socialization.

“Clueless,” along with “scary,” and “crazy,” are the three most common adjectives Dr. Steiner-Adair hears from middle and high school-aged children when describing their parents.

“Scary” parents are judgmental. They dole out harsh punishments and make over-the-top proclamations like, “If you don’t take four advanced placement classes, you’ll never get into medical school.” Scary parents, Dr. Steiner-Adair says, communicate the notion to their children that you are your mistakes.

“Crazy” parents overfunction as the problem-solver. They renegotiate poor test grades. They call the parents of their son or daughter’s playmate to squash a feud. They hinder their child’s ability to function successfully and independently.

“Parents also do things on the Vineyard in the summer like don’t lock up their alcohol. If you’ve got middle schoolers or high schoolers or college kids in your house in a summer setting like this and you don’t lock your liquor, you’re a fool because it might not in fact be your child who steals some or helps themselves to your alcohol ... There are cases now in Massachusetts and New York where parents are going to jail for this.”

Dr. Steiner-Adair encourages parents to teach their children about the dangers of alcohol with the knowledge that they will, most likely, drink. Threats and ultimatums, she says, are ineffective in thwarting the likelihood that an underage person will engage in binge drinking.

The children of parents who acknowledge their child’s independence — rather than try to assert a kind of control that parents do not have — are much more likely to remember the reasons why their parents say that they should not drink, she says.

“Research suggests that the decision to drink or not drink is made every single day individually — every weekend, every Friday night. So, at the risk of sounding very boring, a parent should, every single time their child is going to a party, say, ‘Here are the reasons that we don’t want you to drink: it’s bad for your brain; it’s much more likely that you will get involved in a sexual experience that you will regret the next day; if you drink and the party gets out of control, the likelihood that someone will die in a drunk driving accident [and] all sorts of things that you think will not happen are far more likely to happen . . ..’

“Then, after you have rattled out all these reasons, the most important thing you can say is, ‘You know how we feel, but ultimately, honey, it’s your choice.’”