DR. WALLACE: I live in a small community and am a girl who is 17. I met a guy of my age in a larger town about 45 minutes away from us three months ago.

We began dating on weekends only and we've traded traveling to each community on alternating weekends. My parents are really great about this as my mom will drive me up there on my travel weekends and she will drop me off at his house, say hello to his parents and then get some shopping in until my date ends. Sometimes she'll even sit and drink coffee with his mom, and it's nice that our parents are friendly with one another. My curfew has been a bit early, but she takes me up there before lunch so I get enough time to hang out with my date before we have to

But last week on a Wednesday I saw my out-of-town guy at our local mall! At first I didn't think it was him because he walked the other way. My friends and I followed him through the mall until he couldn't go any further and I finally saw that it was indeed him! I asked him how he got down to our area and he said he was able to borrow the family car.

Then I asked him why he didn't call me first, and he told me that he just wanted to check up on me. I asked him how he knew I was at the mall and he confessed he saw my friends pick me up from my house! I was so stunned by this that I almost couldn't speak! Then I just told him I had to go as my girlfriends and I were leaving to see a movie together, so he just said that he would see me over the upcoming weekend.

Before the weekend arrived last week, I told him that I needed time to myself for a while, so I canceled my visit to his town. I also did the same this weekend.

I'm worried enough about him sneaking down here to spy on me to maybe stop seeing him entirely. I made a few excuses to my mom about why I wasn't planning to see him last weekend or this one, but she does not know about him sneaking around to watch me to see what I was doing. I'm totally creeped out every time I think about this. What should I do at this point? — This Made My Skin Crawl, via email

HIS MADE MY SKIN CRAWL: I recommend that you immediately inform your mother of exactly what happened and let her know that this is the reason you've held off seeing him the last two weekends. Ask your mother for her advice and take things from there. Your mom will no doubt talk this over with your father at length, so bringing both parents into the picture here is a good thing to do in my opinion.

Your mother at least knows and has a friendly relationship with his parents so if there is even a shred of an innocuous explanation to his actions, it can be considered. If there is not, this is a huge red flag and should be treated as such. If he's jealous enough to spy on you surreptitiously at 17, what do you think he may be capable of at 20, 25 or 35?

WE ACT VIRTUALLY THE. SAME BUT OUR RULES ARE VASTLY DIFFERENT

DR. WALLACE: I have a great friend in school, and we are both between the ages of 16 and 17. We're both high grade point average students and we will both likely graduate our high school with honors and go on to very nice colleges after high school.

My question to you is about why some parents clamp down on the teens while others trust their teenagers to a point and give them some leeway. This is the case with our two sets of parents, and I'll bet you can probably guess which set of parents I have in this equation. (You'd know that if I had the "enough leeway" parents I probably wouldn't be sending a question to you!)

His parents trust his judgment enough to give him both a fair curfew and the ability to both date and drive his family's car from time to time.

My parents, on the other hand, say I can't date until I'm 16.5 years old, I can't use our family car and my curfew is an hour and a half shorter than his! I feel this is totally ridiculous. We're almost like twins even though we don't share any common relatives. We both think alike, act alike and achieve alike. Yet my parents have me in a vise-like clamp while his parents trust him pretty well and give him some slack and flexibility to enjoy his teenage experience pretty well. I feel shortchanged? Why do different parents treat very similar teens so differently? — Unequal Treatment, via email

UNEQUAL TREATMENT: This is a very common theme amongst the stream of questions I receive. There are many answers to it, but the most general answer I can give you is that while your life experience and that of your good friend are similar, the life experiences of your fathers (and mothers as well) are likely not so closely aligned.

Parents usually develop their rules and discipline style first drawing upon their own experiences when they were your age, then based upon their peer group of parents and their personal viewpoint of the world. These factors often form the basis of their sets of rules for their own teenagers.

There is no right and wrong answer here, and I can remind you that although your friend has not run into any problems or issues yet, there is still time before he turns 18 for his situation to change.

If you wish to gain more "leeway," as you put it, I suggest that you demonstrate great responsibility and reliability at all times, be helpful and home and when the time is right, ask for a slight increase to your curfew, for example. Don't seek the full 1.5 hours that you'd like, but rather start your request at a half-hour and then respect the new rules to minute. Over time, if you maintain a perfect curfew record, go back and request a little more time as you go.

Remind your parents that you are older, wiser and even more responsible than you were three, six or nine months ago for example. Also point to your immaculate track record, smile and be low key about things, and I trust you'll be able to make some ongoing progress in segments.

Dr. Robert Wallace welcomes questions from readers. Although he is unable to reply to all of them individually, he will answer as many as possible in this column. Email him at [email protected]. To find out more about Dr. Robert Wallace and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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