When you’re a parent, ignorance may not be bliss, but it definitely can let you sleep better at night.

During a visit with my last-born and his wife a few weeks ago, for instance, our conversation turned to what they’d been up to lately.

“We’ve been doing a lot of work on the house,” my son said. “Between that and our jobs, we’ve been busy. We really haven’t had time to do much in the way of fun. Except for the sky diving.”

“Yeah,” that was fun,” my daughter-in-law agreed. “But a little scary, too.”

“I didn’t think it was that scary,” my son said. “After the chute opened it was … “

“Hold it,” I interrupted. “You did what?”

“Sky diving,” my son replied. “Didn’t we tell you about that?”

“No,” I said. And, having never understood what compels any rational person to jump out of an airplane that wasn’t on fire, I was thankful that he hadn’t told me about that.

Apparently I’m not the only parent who would be content to not find out what his kids are doing until long after they’ve done it. Recently, a coworker related that he’d discovered that his adult son had just gone mountain climbing. The son survived with no ill effects; his dad’s still on heart medication.

So once a kid has left the nest, what a parent doesn’t know probably is just as well.

The last time all the kids were at our house, I overheard them talking about things they had done in high school. As one of them started to recall where he and his date had gone after the prom and what they had done when they got there. I yanked out my hearing aids, stuck my index finger in my ears and went “la- la-la, la-la-la” until he was finished.

I’d like to think I wasn’t completely clueless during my tour of duty as an active parent.

On the morning after a party, when I found a stash of empty beer cans behind our garage, I didn’t totally believe the 16-year-old who told us some unknown person must have snuck into our yard and thrown them there.

When my wife and I returned from a vacation and discovered that the vodka bottle in the pantry still was at the same level but now seemed to have been watered down to an alcohol content of approximately four proof, I was skeptical about the 19-year-old’s explanation that some spirits get weaker with age.

I’m sure there are plenty of other things my kids did — and still are doing — that I never knew about, though.

But I’m not going to ask. And I’ll sleep a lot better if they don’t tell.