I don’t drink and now I’m seeing double!
I can’t think of a single reason your son would be less than forthcoming with you about his experimentation with alcohol and other drugs.
Can you?
Moderator Note
Don’t make accusations of trolling outside of the Pit.
This. But probably only that once.
And yeah, your kid may have some issues. I’m glad you apologized to him. Maybe you can still help him.
Do you have any idea how much he is drinking?
None of what you’ve described is a death sentence. I tutored a Harvard student who told me he took acid on New Year’s Eve every year. He wasn’t great at calculus, but he was basically a together kid who was doing fine.
I actually believe him when he says the acid thing was a joke. I confirmed with the other parent that they had told a friend that they were doing it at a sleepover to freak him out. They did actually drink and took a cellphone video to send to the kid saying things like “look at the sky” etc. They thought it was funny.
My son was adamant that acid would mess up his brain. When I said that weed had done similar damage, he told me that acid was much worse.
As for drinking, the sleepovers were when they were doing it. We know of two, possibly three times. Beer, they said.
Well, acid does mess with your brain a great deal more than weed. You ought to know stuff like that. If you say things like “weed does similar damage to acid” your kids will know that you have no idea what you are talking about, and won’t trust other things you say, that might be true.
Someone message me when they start smoking crack.
Or having sex - with themselves or someone else - of either sex!
Declanium - you sound like you are coming from someplace extremely naive, conservative, intolerant, or all combined. What your kid is doing sounds pretty darned normal. Many - if not most - teens do as bad or worse. (Which is not to say that it can’t be quite frustrating for any parent.) Nearly all of them survive just fine.
Feel free to react - or overreact - how you wish.
Your repeated threads do seem to suggest you are somewhat of a drama whore.
You ultimately gotta ask yourself, if these are to be this child’s errors in judgement, when exactly do you want him to be doing his poor choice making, if NOT at fifteen? Would you rather he suppressed all this, (Y’know, to please you!) and then at thirty five start making bad choices? When it will most likely cost him his job, family, marriage sending his whole life wildly off the rails. Now IS the age for him to be learning life lessons. Consider the wisdom to stand back and let life do the teaching.
The world is pretty forgiving of young men ‘learning some things the hard way’. Far, far less so for adults. You don’t have to approve, but you should recognize at this age he’s on the ragged fringes of beyond your command.
I think your silent disapproval will prove far more effective that heavy handed discipline and constant pushing for him to ’obey’ you.
Good Luck!
Gods, I miss being 15. We would sit by the river, naked and covered in ash. We’d spend the whole day smoking hashish, engaging in sexual rituals and eating human flesh.
Point taken. And look what you turned into!
I can’t speak to ‘mess with your brain’ as far as damage, but acid certainly takes you to a very different place. However, the thing about acid is that you (or rather, most people) don’t have any interest in doing it regularly. You might smoke pot every day, but only do acid here and there. I smoked as much as any other HS/college kid, a few times a day, every day. Between acid and mushroom, I probably did them a combined total of less than a dozen times during HS/college.
He went back to school and now he’s not just a pile of crap but Dr Crap!
Have you tried drinking more?
That statement right there, that’s one of the big reasons why (arguably) the DARE program is a failure. If you lie and make stuff up (purposely or otherwise), at some point they learn the truth.
Similarly, abstinence-only policies rarely work and often make things worse.
My suggestion would be to do what a lot of parents do. You drill in to them that you don’t want them to using AODA, they do their best to hide it. You get your point across and they’ll use it less because they know how you feel about it.
Joey, the disapproval is loud and clear. From both my husband and me. We are working at rebuilding our relationship with them, particularly the younger one who is seemingly more of the rebel in this family.
I hope our disapproval matters more than the feeling for they get when they use drugs.
Yes, unrelenting disapproval is one of the cornerstones of effective parenting.
You can rest assured it does. Nothing like disapproval to make a kid want to do less drugs. You’re a genius. If you really ratchet it up I’ll bet he won’t be doing drugs (or anything else) by the end of the year.
He’s 15 and he knows what weed is, bro. 100% he’s already butt-vaping uranium
So the problem is he’s not sharing, or what?
No. the mother just wasn’t getting enough attention.
The only thing that comes close to mommy’s Christmas pancakes… Truly, this is a predictable turn of events.