Keep your kids off drugs: Pester the HELL out of them?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

These new Partnership For A Drug-Free-America commercials are pissing me off. “Ask your kids where, when, who…” WTF??

Seems to me that when parents barrage their kids with tons of questions about where they’re going and who with…the kids are gonna just get annoyed and do it anyway. And HELLO…kids LIE! And kids are more PRONE to lie when their parents keep bugging them and not trusting them, right?

“Billy, where are you going tonight?”
“Oh, Im going to go hang out with that 23 year old dropout who just got out of jail for drug possession and sexual assault.”
“Oh, thats nice, dear. Have a good time!”

Whatever.

Of course, what do I know…I dont have kids and probably never will. And I probably just had an abnormal upbringing – as a teen I wasnt Mr Social, didnt care to go out all the time, had no interest in drugs or being around the trouble-makers…oh, not to mention the fact that I was raised with SENSE - my parents never needed to grill me with questions because they KNEW me and trusted me. Guess Im an alien…

2

Odd you should post this at this time. Australia is also in the middle of an expensive and extensive campaign to get parents involved in talking to their children - an in particular, their teenagers - about drugs.

A couple of months ago there was an extremely high profile media campaign announcing the launch of a government booklet addressing the lack of information about drugs. This booklet was delivered to every household in Australia, and contained basic information about a variety of legal and illegal drugs, the methods of use, short-term and long term effects etc. It also contained a resources page listing numbers and web addresses for both further information and assistance with drug issues.

The follow up campaign was a little bit “Brady Bunch”, but the basic message was along the lines of “we, the government, have put a basic resource kit into your hands, please TALK to your kids about this issue”.

We have a national broadcaster here (The Australian Broadcasting Corporation), funded entirely by the government. One of the radio stations operated by our the ABC (Triple J) is a dedicated to serving the youth market. I was heartened to see yesterday, that Triple J has opened a dedicated forum where it’s listeners can discuss drug issues on-line and receive.

Before giving the link, I’d like to stress again, this is a government radio station’s message board, and the “Paul” referred to in the forum title is from the government funded National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre.

You can find the Doing Drugs with Paul Dillon forum here. You might also be interested in reading the short description of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre’s mission and goals, which can be found on their homepage.

I’m curious about how this approach compares to the US “war on drugs”, and whether your strategy in respect of youth offers similar opportunities for youth to discuss their concerns/issues regarding this subject with government endorsement.

I forgot to mention that the forum is moderated, so any discussion you see in the forum has been well and truly checked against broadcasting and other guidelines before the actual posts appear.

3

All I can tell you is anecdotes(sp?) from raising my kids. My son (22 now) was alot like you. He had friends, a few, and didn’t really run around alot. I now know that in his teens he did try drugs, but didn’t care for them somehow, and didn’t ‘get’ into them.

My daughter (17 now) is a Totally different story. Again, I found this out After the fact. I was working a lot of overtime, going in at 3am till 3pm. Oh she was home when I left for work, with a friend or two over to spend the night. Well, turns out after I left for work she and her friends would go out ‘partying’. I would come in all tired out and usually nap when I first got home, plenty of time for her to sleep off the booze and/or drugs. She’d be a sweet little ol’ thing till I went to bed for the night, usually around 8:30 or 9pm. Time to start all over.

And…? Having very little trouble with the first one, I just assumed with the second. BIG mistake. As I got to know her friends better, and the parents, doubts started running through my mind. So I started asking questions. Big resistance. “You didn’t treat Bubba this way!” No I didn’t but then Bubba didn’t start alarm bells ringing. To make a long story short, I did what the campaigns say. Started bugging, asking questions, demanding to know her whereabouts, tried grounding her - hard to do working 12hr shifts with no SO to help out. She finally confessed to what all she was doing and had did. After a lot of emotional conflict/arguing. Oh, and calling the cops a couple of times to locate her.

Turns out YES! kids do think & realize you care when you bug 'em. And while yes they will lie, it gets harder and harder to do and keep your stories straight. The more you find out, the more you realize what the situation is, the better control you can take. And, yes again, control is a part of parenting. Why do you think you call your parents SENSIBLE? Since your parents KNEW where you were and KNEW what you were doing with whom, there was no need to grill. Not so with kids who get around drinking and drugs. So how does one find out? ASK QUESTIONS! BUG 'EM! DRILL 'EM TILL THE STORY COMES OUT STRAIGHT! And go from there.

This long story isn’t getting shorter.

My daughter is much better now, thank you for asking. We have much more communication now. I do believe her now when she says she no longer does drugs. Why? Because I believe she does tell me everything now. Why? 'Cause she doesn’t have time to do other than what she tells me, cause it seems she tells me everything! She does have an occasional drink (I know, 17) but SHE TELLS ME! Good thing? Yes. Because it is only occasional, and yes I believe she is being honest.

She tells me of her friends whose parents don’t seem to care, because … they don’t ASK QUESTIONS! She once thought I didn’t care. I did, but was just so busy :rolleyes:. And tired. And etc. etc.

Therefore I agree with the ads. ASK. WHO. WHERE. WHEN. WHAT. ETC. Remember this if you are ever a parent, please. Not all kids are lucky enough to have parents like yours. :slight_smile:

dob

4

The best way to get your kids not to try drugs is to subtlely, but consistantly, send the message that if they screw up, you won’t love them any more. You can apply a veneer of guilt to lots of situations to get kids to stick to the straight and narrow. Hey, it worked for my parents, well mom actually. Neither my brother nor I want kids of our own, go figure.

5

Hey, it works better than the other school of parenting. “Do good by your kids. Ignore them.”

6

“You won’t love them anymore” is the saddest type of parenting I know. Let your kids know that you will love them no matter what. Then ask who what where etc… Kids WANT discipline. I thought this was the stupidest saying, till my daughter proved it is true.

7

There is a difference between not loving your kids and not respecting them. As a parent, I will always love my kids, no matter what they do. If they get into drugs, I will still love them and support them, but I won’t respect them… and I’ll let them know that up front. Hopefully they will be mature enough when that time comes to know the difference and I am pretty sure it will send the kind of message I want to send that will keep them away from all that bad stuff.

8

whoooosssshhhh…!

9

I honestly don’t see how wanting to know where your child is and when they will be home is all that pestering. Its info you need as a guardian. When the kid gets mugged and put in a ditch is better to be able to tell the police “Well, she left at seven with Kristi to go to a party at Dan’s and she said she’d be home by four.” than “Um…”

However, if the said child can’t come up with a way to make said party a safe enviornment, they probably shouldn’t go. These were the rules through my teenage career as a party girl.
“I’m going to a big drunken bash in the woods, be home by dawn.”
“Wait a sec there, who’s driving?”
“Me. And my car will be parked in the carpool lot a mile away, no drunks in it or close enough to puke on it.”
“Drive safe, have fun”
“See you!”

Its not a grilling, just a talk so everyone has the needed info. I do much teh same when my mom goes on business trips. I know where she’s going, when she’ll be home, where’s she’s staying and I have a phone number that I can contact her at. It keeps people safe and happy.

10

“Ask your kids where, when, who…”

I don’t call this pestering so much as gathering basic information. All the trust in the world isn’t going to bring back a kid who goes missing, or lands in a hospital, or any other variety of bad scenario. My parents asked me those things every time I went out, and still do, when I am home for a visit. I’ll ask my kid(s) the same thing, when I reproduce.

The questions themselves surely won’t keep a kid off drugs, but it does escalate the level of parental involvement, which helps. Discipline, guidance, rules, and consistency are some staples to a balanced childhood. My parents trusted me (and yeah, I lied to them sometimes, and sometimes got away with it), but I also needed to trust them. I needed to trust that they would know how to bail me out if I landed in serious trouble, and would be at my side if I got hurt. Without them knowing the basics of what I was up to, how could I have expected them to do that?

11

I happen to be a teenager, living with my parents, and not doing drugs.

looks around nervously and clears throat

Reason # 1- Here’s the thing with me and my family. My parents have always conveyed strongly that they don’t want me to get into smoking, drinking or drug-use. My mom never did drugs, though she did drink once she hit legal age. My father (who I playfully accuse of being a pothead) will only say that he made “some poor choices in his youth” when it comes to drugs.

My grandparents are also all Christian, very respectable church-going folks who would probably go into cardiac arrest if I was ever caught doing anything unreputable. My cousins have already screwed up pretty badly (child out of wedlock, dropping out of college, various other things, etc.) So it’s always been impressed on my sister and I to be good little angels and make the family proud.

So though rebellion is firmly imprinted on me as a result of harmones and basic teenage opression, I have no wish to bring pain to my family. I have a rather healthy sense of Christian guilt that was instilled at an early age, and feel enough guilt for not being perfect as it is. I figure since my parents are cool with me (after 21) drinking, and that if I use protection then they won’t tell Grandma and Pop Pop.

Reason #2- I’m a Christian, and that counts for something. I’m part of God. A little of Him is in me. My body is a temple. To desecrate more than it already is would be like treason. I don’t consider myself worthy of salvation most of the tiime (no one is, really) but I am a child of God. One of the things I should do is to honor Him, and using drugs is not honoring him in the slightest. (Though God doesn’t say tattoos are evil. That is such b.s. When he says not to make marks on your body, he was instructing the people of the Old Testament not to adorn themselves like pagans. I’ve seen a lot of really cool Christians with tattoos, so poop on that.)

Reason #3- Though I have a wide range of ecletic friends, my nearest and dearest (don’t you hate that phrase?) happen to be clean (no drugs, no drinking, no sex) or at least for the most part. Quite a few are ones who have become clean only in the past few months, thanks to a narced-on-the-buddies, got-parents-involved incident. Plus some of my pothead friends were scared-they were smoking themselves away, little by little.
So, they’d kick my ass.

And I don’t want to die.
#4. I’m an addictive kind of person. My dad, who I’m most like, is too. I don’t wanna risk it.

So, a recap
#1 My family
#2 I’m Christian
#3 My friends would kill me
#4 I don’t wanna risk it

12

Bear with me on this…I’m not entirely agreeing with the “pestering” policy.

When I was in high school, I kept my parents apprised of where I was, not because I was mindlessly obeying them but for my own safety. When I was 14, we moved to a different state, and we’d hardly been there a month when a girl, who would have been in my grade when school started, went missing, then turned up dead. And of course, she’d told her parents she going somewhere other than where she was actually going, or didn’t tell them anything; I forget the details. So any chance the parents and police would have had of tracing her route was lost.

Not that telling one’s whereabouts is the answer to everything, but it helps. I still do it with Mr. Rilch. I figure if I tell him I’m stopping at Albertson’s and the library after work, and then don’t come home, he’ll at least be able to tell the cops that, so they can question people at those places.

However. [sub]However[/sub]. My mom got the mistaken idea, from this, that I was going to tell her everything I was doing, as well as where I was. Not bloody likely. And when I got older, and socializing got more complicated that simply walking to get an ice cream, then watching TV at someone’s house, she started forbidding me to go out if I couldn’t tell her ahead of time what I was going to do. “Going to Michelle’s house” was as much as I knew at the outset: from there, it was making phone calls and seeing who (and what) we could gather. No way: she said. If you can’t tell me what you’re going to do, I don’t know what you’re going to do, and you might be doing something I don’t want you to do. Here’s a clue, mom: very few teenagers do exactly what their parents want and avoid doing what their parents don’t want. One contemporary (not friend) said, “I don’t tell them anything; I just leave.” But my mom was the kind who would “check” on me throughout the evening, and if I suddenly wasn’t there…I probably would have come home to a juvenile officer. No joke.

Not that I approve of the way some of my classmates treated their parents’ houses like a hotel, but I should have been allowed to go out.

13

I know a good many parents who are so concerned about their children stomping about here and there that they give up and just let their house become an almost free-reign area for their kids and their friends.

I also have a good friend whose parents must have figured that their house was a good as any other house to crash at, because their home is the site for band-practice, hometown punk rock shows and all sorts of hanging out (pot-smoking included, at least in the past.)

I don’t know which is better. I for one, possess a mother who also wants to know exactly who I’m with and where at all times. It’s hard to know sometimes.

I’ll go to say, Chris’s house. From Chris’s house we might walk to Bob’s. Then Chris, Bob and I are picked up by our driving friend Sid, who takes us to Barnes and Noble, where we stumble onto Sue and Jimmy, who walk with us to the Dollar Tree. It’s a little hard to keep up without a cell phone or a computer chip built into your skull that your parents keep you on radar with.

Rilchiam…I didn’t want to bring this up, but right after I read this post I wandered over into your blow job one. I can’t take it! It’s too much! head explodes

14

Truth: Heehee! It may sound like mixed messages, but I’m 31, and I think my mom knows Mr. Rilch and I are doing it! :wink:

You described the situation quite well, better than my attempt. That’s really the way it is. When I was 14, it was simple: I go to Lisa’s house, she and Amy and I walk down to the Frosty Freeze, then we go to Amy’s house and watch TV. But when you’re 17, and you know more people, and cars are involved, you just have to put it all under the umbrella of “I’m going to Chris’s house.”

What I should have said then, but didn’t realize until years later, is that parents can’t follow their kids around their whole lives. At some point, they have to hope that they did instill good judgement. And…here’s a really far-out idea…maybe let their kids make mistakes? So they can learn from them?

15

My Mom never really grilled me because she didn’t need to. I never had any real urge to be doing things I shouldn’t. I told her where I was going and what I planned on doing (sometimes ended up doing something else, but it wasn’t every too bad). My curfew was midnight and it eventually got to the point where she said “please stop waking me up to tell me you’re home, just be home by midnight.” Even with that I was never more than half-an-hour late.

My sisters on the other hand needed to be grilled absolutely. They would lie so casually about what and where they were going. If my sister was walking from the kitchen to the living room and my mom conversationally asked where she was going, my sister would say “the dining room” just to lie. My mom’s only hope was to make telling consistent lies such a burden that failure was inevitable. Still, none of this worked. My sisters ended up doing drugs, fucking around, and not graduating from high school. But I am convinced my mom’s efforts at least slowed the process.

(A story about one of my sister’s. When she was elevenish, it got to be 10pm and she still hadn’t come home. Everybody is frantic and the police have been called. She is not where she said she would be. Hours of scouring the neighborhood and she comes wandering home at 11:30. Her only excuse? “I didn’t know it was dark.” Where were you? “At the park.”)

16

Oh, an example of the non-questioning parent.

When I was about 13 a friend stayed over for the night. He told my mom that permission had been granted. The next morning (a Saturday) he and I wander back over to his house.

When his mom saw me she said (and I quote absolutely): “Oh, that’s where you were last night.”

That is when I discovered that other kids didn’t necessarily always tell Mom where they would be, and that other parents didn’t always care. From that point on, my mom always called the parent to confirm permission.

17

“Oh, that’s where you were last night?”?!?!?!

My mother, had I ever been out after 11:00 in my teen years without an itinerary filed with her, would have been pacing the floor, calling police, rousing the neighborhood to search, and making my father absolutely insane with her worry.

I just can’t imagine parents who don’t care that their child is not in the house all night!!

jayjay

18

My parents always insisted on knowing where I was, at pretty much any given moment. At the time, it was a pain in the butt, but now that I’m married and raising children, I know why.

My husband gets annoyed with me sometimes because, like my parents did with me, I like to know where he is going to be. He thinks I’m micromanaging his life. But it’s not that at all. Never once have I said “No, I don’t want you going there” or “You’d better be home by X time, or I’m going to be pissed” (even though there’s a few people I kinda wish he’d ditch, and I do wish he’d come home earlier). But the thing is, we’re married. We’ve got kids. Dammit, I need to know where he is and how I can reach him, in case of an emergency.

As for my kids, they’re still quite young (age 4 and age 19 months). But when they get old enough to be going places on their own, without the supervision of me or a trusted family member, you’re damn right I’m going to pester them. And if they hate me for a time, because I insist on knowing where they are and who they’re with, so be it. Hopefully they’ll come to the same realization that I did–my parents bugged me not because they felt like it, but because they cared.

19

Question. You were there and I wasn’t…but is it possible that your mom’s constant grilling spurred their rebellion? That’s exactly how my mom was, and she had no reason (at first) to doubt me. If I went down to the basement, it was “What are you doing?” If I went through the hallway past the living room, it was “Rilch…where are you going?” Once I was downstairs at 11pm when I was 14, and my mom was in bed. I was making some toast, after which I planned to do teeth-face-bed, and all of a sudden I hear, “Rilch…are you awake?!” No decent, wellbehaved 14 year old is awake at 11pm; what was I thinking?! So I lost respect for her.

I don’t know what your sisters might have done to prompt these interrogations, but I developed the habit of saying, “Watching porn!” in response to “What are you doing?” Once I had a male friend to visit, watching a video in the living room, all perfectly clean and aboveboard. He left and I went down to the basement. “Rilch! You’re not letting him in the storm cellar are you?”

“No, but thanks for giving me the idea!”

How did she “make such a burden that failure was inevitable”? Just curious.

20

Parents can be really strange at times. Rilchiam with your 11pm “Toast” story reminded me on how my Mother used to be hard on me. My Father never really nagged me much. Way back when I was younger, I had to be in bed for 10pm for school. Even in high school on school nights, 11pm was the time. Now I remember one time around 8-9 yrs old I went to bed at 10pm got up around 12-12:30pm and my older siblings were up with my Mom watching TV like they seemed to do without me knowing every night until I found out. My mom screamed at me to go back to bed. The older siblings had to go to school too.

It was strange because my older brother used to be out at night during high school, never told where he was, what he did, tie up the phone, got his “dream car”, etc. I was restricted to ridiculous rules but I was the one that behaved. He did drugs, had to be picked up many times at the police station by my parents, cursed them out, etc. but they never really punished him. He is not really bad now but still has his poor drinking habits. The one thing really got me during high school, my mother always got the detention slips in the mail and hid them from my father so my brother wouldn’t get punished. This for so many times I can’t even give a number. I get one, one MINOR detention slip, and it was hell time at the house. My mother also used to make excuses so my brother could skip school when he wanted to sometimes during HS.

Me and my SO have both agreed to NOT have kids at this time so we don’t know how we would treat our kids but we both have almost the same experiences from parents. I guess from the others being so bad and out of line, they wanted to make sure I was on the right path.