I would rather not have added to the verbiage: it is a thousand pities that Julie Myerson, in publishing a book about how she banished her teenage son from home, has turned her family into an upmarket version of the Osbournes. But the past three days' intensification of claim and counter-claim in four national newspapers raises too many questions to ignore.

Not questions about drugs, but about literary ethics and the balance of rights within a family. Neither as writer nor parent do I find those questions easy to dodge. Julie Myerson - who said dreamily yesterday “my writing comes from a place I don't have total control over”- had less trouble. You cannot describe the section aired so far as washing dirty laundry in public: she merely selects one son's skidmarks to wave them, unlaundered, in our faces. The son, Jake, with equal eloquence, waved her own grubby underthings right back at her in the Daily Mail. Her husband says that his wife is “devastated” and never expected such attention; she does, however, appear generous with photoshoots, advance interviews and excerpts.

In case you have been mercifully spared this chattering-class version of Heat magazine, the story is that the Myersons had a tough time with a stroppy 17-year-old (now 20) who smokes skunk. Her claim is that after an idyllically sweet childhood he hit her, broke all the pot plants, shoplifted and got a 16-year-old pregnant so that the Myersons “absolutely had to” whisk her to a private abortion clinic rapidly before “her mood could change”. She says he was pulling the family over the edge so she cut the rope. The father accepts the “prohibition” on exposing children's lives but emotes: “This is an emergency. The emergency is called skunk.” Both claim their betrayal will “help people” but it is hard to see how.

Turn to the lad himself, three years into a ramshackle but viable adult life, and a different version emerges. He says he is not an addict, just a user, was scared by his eviction but stayed in education, that his parents are insanely neurotic about drugs now but initially told him cannabis was fine if he didn't get addicted to tobacco. He claims that they are volatile and violent themselves, and that a year of parental fights and threatened separation when he was 12 ended the idyllic childhood. Oh, and he is sick of being written about “since I was two”.

The mother says he OK'd the book; he says he couldn't legally stop it but made her take out the bit about selling his little brother drugs, “which is one of her fantasies” (still in the weekend excerpt, I notice). He sums up: “She has taken the very worst years of my life and cleverly blended it into a work of art, and that to me is obscene. I was only 17, I was a confused teenager... she is a writer and like a lot of writers she is wrapped up in her own world”.

On it goes, painful and public and worse than useless. Since there is no consensus, we don't really know how impossibly druggy he was or how competent the parents. That strong cannabis brings a risk of psychosis and a certainty of infuriating behaviour, we already knew. So the only things to consider are literary ethics and the balance of family rights.

The ethics are quite simple. To share general experiences of parenthood is reasonable, but if idiosyncratic, embarrassing or painful things are involved the child has right of veto. I wrote childcare books, mixing commonplace experience with wider data, but stopped when my own were 8, and related nothing personal to them after infancy. I note that in the Myerson context some spiteful Alpha Mummy blogger claims that I wrote about my late son “up to the point” of his death, which is a lie. I wrote nothing about his private life until a brief account introducing his fine - posthumous - book. And he did nothing wrong: the idea of exposing a living, fragile boy of 20 like young Myerson to an account of his bygone misbehaviour is frankly monstrous.

The problem, I suspect, was that Julie Myerson is a compulsive writer and that once lovely phrases begin forming in her head her self-control evaporates. Perhaps it is her equivalent of a really good spliff. As to publishing, she says she asked “Am I happy? Is it truthful? Am I proud?” and answered yes. The question “Is it right?” appears not to have occurred. All of us who write know the temptation: but that a personal paragraph is beautiful does not mean it should be public. Sometimes you have to leave it in a drawer. I often have.

But writers, mercifully, number fewer than parents, and the most important aspect of this business is not literary but universal. It is about the balance of power within a family when children are nearly adult. Over and over again in published excerpts you hear a sense of outrage at the boy's escape from the pretty chrysalis of infancy - “We are moving house and he refuses to join in the excitement... our child who has always been so reliable... my little boy... the loss of my child.”

The lad spiritedly retorts that all mothers lose their little children - “it's called puberty”. Admitting that he was horrid, he admonishes his parents for not being grown-up enough to contain normal teenage rebellion and struggles for identity. “They are like two scared children who have a rose-tinted view of the world and, when something doesn't conform to it, they desperately try to force it.”

See? This is really a debate about who has the power: who stage-directs and records an emerging life. The affluent, settled adult, or the young, troubled, irresponsible but exclusive owner of that life? It is a moral question all parents meet, with more or less grace. It brings tension over exams, universities, careers, clothes, love affairs. Not having an uncontested version I cannot judge whether they were right to throw the boy out. But I do know that they have no right to claim ownership of his story, flog it to Bloomsbury, confirm it as non-fiction in a Bookseller interview and put him through a publicity mill.

Jake Myerson belongs to himself. They all do. That is the bit the childcare manuals forget to mention: you have to let go mentally even if you still care financially and physically for a young adult. To throw him out physically, yet retain publishing rights in his troubles, is disgusting.

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