If one even uses this message board as an indicator, one would find that my comment was accurate. Plenty of folks have posted here (or on my original post) that they used drugs as teens and continue to do so now in adulthood.
I really don’t think the thread is only about one person’s teenage sons, so can we please end the hijack?
If someone has a mother so useless that’s she’s willing to scrape them off like a dog turd on her shoe because they smoke pot they’ll probably end up in the dumpster, but it’s the shitty mom,not the pot that’ll be responsible.
That’s rich. All of the SD potheads who were advising me to toke up with the kids, criticizing me. Cute. Go back to your bongs. Wonder if you smoked with your mother.
I’m starting to think that the kids are using drugs as an escape or rebellion from their tyrant of a mother. I can see disowning a child who’s a crack, meth, and/or heroin addict until they get clean, because of all the carnage they leave in their wake, but marijuana? While it’s not harmless, c’mon.
I think YOU need counseling more than your kids do.
I agree with this, emphatically.
I read the OP to be more about signs of greatness–can you tell at 16 that someone is the next Neil Armstrong or Barack Obama or Jeff Bezos or whatever. I think you can probably tell if someone has the capacity for greatness, but not if it will be realized–so much of that is about luck and opportunity and resources. There’s no way to predict that.
So even if that were true, which it is not, why do you think your sons can’t also be exceptions? You have such little faith in them because…?
Going by the next post you made, I now agree with others that you’re simply trying to get a rise out of people.
On Declanium’s original thread (where I think this discussion should now move back, because it’s getting off topic), she said,
In other words, this is about keeping up with the Joneses, who have such wonderful and perfect children. This is about her own ego. She sees her sons as her possessions that she can use to show off how what a wonderful mom she is. That’s why there’s this huge over-reaction.
She is not actually devastated about them, but about herself. ‘Other people’s kids are so perfect, and that means other people have beaten me in the competition as to who can bring up their kids better. My kids have failed me and betrayed me, despite all I have done for them, by making me lose the competition to be better than the neighbors.’ She likes to imagine this is about what is best for her kids, but really it’s all about her.
Her sons will be leaving home in a few years, and probably they will do better out of the grip of such a controlling and obsessive mother.
Perhaps… they were smoking dope as a way of dealing with the stress of living with their extremely demanding mother.
I was really trying to give Declanium the benefit of the doubt in that other thread, but wow. I wonder if you could look at a sixteen-year-old girl and have any idea she’d grow up to be the kind of mother whose love for her children is so limited and conditional.
Probably not. I was super straightlaced at sixteen, just the sort of person Declanium describes herself as. Until I got my heart broken and illusions shattered. Long story; details not relevant. The next year I was experimenting with sex, drugs, and possibly even rock and roll. I didn’t hurt anyone, myself included; still managed to graduate and go on to college. But I often think back on that time in my life as the great epiphany about how being a good person is both so much more and so much less than abstaining from things churchy ladies tsk tsk at. It saddens me that you still seem to be stuck in this childish understanding of right and wrong, after life has handed you such a fantastic opportunity to grow.
False, wrong, and incorrect.
For example, the 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health from the feds (warning: PDF; see p. 167) estimated that 118 million Americans aged 12 and older have used marijuana in their lifetime; less than 24 million used in the month before the survey. Cocaine? 38 million lifetime users, of whom two million used in the preceding month. LSD? 25 million have tried it; less than half a million used in the previous month.
Yes, be realistic. Look at real data, and you’ll quickly discover that a lot of people do quit drugs, particularly as they age out of teenage angst and peer pressure.
This is entirely false based on my experience. Most of the kids I grew up with, including myself, used drugs. Now, very few of us do - less than 20%, if that.
Weirdly, pot was recently legalized in my state (IL), and I’ve been astounded at the number of people in their 50s-60s who have expressed an interest in trying pot, who NEVER tried it before. So maybe, “If you DIDN’T get high at 15…” 
Indeed. Same with my experience. I personally didn’t use pot until I was more like 17 or 18, but I’ve only had it maybe <40 times total in my life. And it’s been years since I’ve last had it … at least five. A lot of people just grow out of it; a lot just use it like others use alcohol. In my experience, there’s no correlation between pot use and success in later life. Some of the biggest potheads I know have out-earned me their whole lives. (And I was a model straight-A student at 16 with no drug or alcohol use. I did fine, but a lot of those people went into higher earning professions like computer science, sales, trading, etc.)
But more with the OP, I think you can probably get a reasonable sense of how somebody will end up, but there’s a shit ton of variance. Me at 16 vs me at 22 and me now are completely different people. The biggest idiot in my group of friends (as in the one taking remedial classes) at 16 actually grew up to be reasonably intelligent and works in IT now. Everybody though I was going to become a doctor or engineer, but I ended up loving journalism and photography and life took me that way instead.
At 16, while some base personality traits are there, I feel like people are still enormously malleable.
No, POTUSs and serial killers are such a statistically small portion of the population that it would be impossible to predict.
This is such a broad statement that it is effectively meaningless with respect to predicting future “greatness”.
Getting high off what? how frequently? And how does that affect that person’s future prospects for “greatness”? Didn’t seem to hurt the careers of Kenny Rogers, Cheech & Chong, Bill Maher, Seth Rogan, and others.
Also, are we talking “great” or just happy and successful. I have a high school friend who worked on Broadway as an understudy in Wicked. A pretty cool job by most standards. Doesn’t make her Idina Menzel.
You must have met my cousin, lol. Used to get into regular screaming fits with her mom. Was caught stealing a couple times. She eventually moved to LA, got a job cooking and fell in love with it. She met her now-husband, had two kids and they sell really neat recipes they created.
While direct comparisons aren’t really helpful, I’d say she’s further on in her life than I am, and I’m about 2 years older. She’s settled and has had a job she loves for awhile now, while I’m single and only just got my first job in my chosen field last October. I’m not putting myself down, and life isn’t a race, but the idea that a kid getting in trouble is screwed over forever while the well-behaved child is guaranteed success is bullshit.
Um, I hate to break it to you, but they have both your DNA…
I’d like to see how your (lack of) logic pertains to kids who DO change their lives around. My cousin was one such child. I commented in your other thread, but she hated her mother and got into trouble a few times for stealing. She moved out, grew up, has a much healthier relationship with her mom, is married with a great job and has two kids. Hell, she’s doing better than I currently am, and I was always the ‘good kid’ growing up.
Clearly, the only logical conclusion is that her genetics changed after she moved out.
I second that. She’s alienating her kids, which is all but guaranteed to bite her in the ass down the road. There’s a good chance they’ll form a much healthier bond with their father, leaving her to resent them all. Of course, she’ll frame it as ‘she just cared for them more’. She comes off as a lot more petty than nurturing, TBH.
I’ll skip personal anecdotes. Try this:
No, at 70 I’m not who or what I was at 10 or 15 or 20. I blame learning.