IN THE MOVIES, there are always jukeboxes and boys in tight jeans with bulging biceps. The hangout is a drugstore on Main Street, Anywhere, USA. In Dublin, it's the pavement outside McDonalds on Grafton Street on a Saturday afternoon.

Aoife, now 20, remembers. "As soon as you hit secondary school, everyone wants to hang out in town. So from age 13 to 15, you head for McDonalds and stand outside with your friends, meeting people, boys, from other schools, yap yap yap all afternoon. All you do is talk and listen to boys telling the same stories over and over again."

It's a familiar scene, not just in Dublin, but in cities and bigger towns around the country. It's innocent, probably harmless enough, but - for parents - scary. Many parents have problems loosening the reins as children move to teenagerhood - Aoife's mother is much less strict with her 13 year old sister than she was with Aoife on the Grafton Street issue - and now they have fears about drugs and violence as well.

Kathleen Kelleher, senior clinical psychologist with the Mater Dei Institute, says "hanging out" is much more an issue for parents than it was 10 years ago. Nick Killian, spokesman for the National Parents' Council (Post Primary) agrees.

"Parents are more fearful, especially of kids passing through town," Killian says. "Fearful of what they're doing with their pocket money, whether they're spending it on drink, or drugs; there's fear of violence too."

Hanging out takes many forms, of course: lots of young teenagers want to go from house to house in their own suburbs, collecting friends and just walking, sometimes after dark. In spring and summer, they want to gather in the local green, or park, or on somebody's wall. And even if you know that a lot of this is a healthy part of getting independence and growing up, it makes a lot of parents uneasy.

Most parents agree with both Kelleher and Killian, who stress that it's bad to let children grow up over protected. However, the problem, as always, is putting theory into practice.

If your 12 year old's friends turn up on the doorstep at 9 p.m. on a dark Saturday night to ask her to go out for a walk, do you say yes or no?

Do you let your 13 year old daughter hang out on the green space near your house with all the other local teens on a bright summer night?

And what about letting them go into town?

Talking to other parents, especially ones who've gone through all this already, can be helpful, but can make you apprehensive. One parent tells of answering the doorbell at 11 p.m. to find her son's 14 year old mate who lived five miles away on the doorstep, wondering if her son would like to come out. Is this the kind of pressure you'll be up against?

Many parents will work hard to get their kids involved in activities that leave little time for hanging out, though Killian confirms what many parents know: there's a lack of youth facilities in certain areas all over the country.

Most families will establish limits, depending on their own values, the maturity of their child, the kind of friends he or she has, the kind of neighbourhood they live in. But there are a number of basic rules, and as always, they are the blindingly obvious.

Kelleher and Killian spell them out: if your child wants to go out, you must find out:

. where they are going;

. with whom they are going;

. how they are getting there;

. when they will be home. Needless to remark, you should make sure they do get home on time.

The first time you let your child go into town, Kelleher says, you might insist they come home in two hours' time. You should discuss all aspects of the outing with them, ask them where they will keep their money, find out what they and their friends are going to do in town.

You should try to keep it light at the same time, so you don't make your child too fearful - perhaps laughing as you say "Well, all parents have to ask these questions."

"Thirteen year olds don't have the mental equipment to analyse what your concerns are, it can just come across as a fearsome `they don't trust me'," she says.

You could broaden out the discussion: "Are the people you'll be with people you'd be happy to bring home to me? Are other people likely to be afraid of you in a group?"

"The fact is, a lot of people, especially the elderly, can be afraid of groups of teenagers, especially lads," Kelleher says. "At least the questions will be in your child's head, even if they don't tell you exactly what's going on."

MOST PARENTS, says Kelleher, want their 12 and 13 year olds to be in somewhere and supervised after dark. You should encourage your own child to bring friends home. And it's reasonable to phone and check on young teenagers, to make sure they really are in a friend's house if that is where they said they were going. (Always be on the alert for this scam, which can fool several sets of parents into thinking their darlings are safe in somebody else's house.)

It isn't appropriate to check up like this on 15 or 16 year olds, she adds, unless they have done something which means they have to reestablish trust, e.g. if they've been caught shoplifting or taking drugs.

And of course drugs are something all parents will worry about: ecstasy is now under £10 a tab, and you hear of kids splitting one for a fiver each, Killian says. The National Parents Council recently launched a drugs awareness programme, aimed at 12 to 15 year olds, that states: "Parents must find out what their children are doing with their pocket money. If they have too much - and some kids are getting £10 and £20 - they can be introduced to cider drinking, or to ecstasy, which is aimed towards that age group."

Dublin city centre isn't necessarily the main problem: a garda in Pearse Street garda station says that Grafton Street, St Stephen's Green, and Temple Bar are safe for young teenagers in the afternoons; these areas are patrolled by gardai 24 hours a day "and drug dealers wouldn't last too long".

The truth is, your own vigilance is probably the most important factor in making "hanging out" safe for your child. And with luck, the usual mix of concern, trust, and paranoia, diluted with a dose of common sense, will see you through.