My oldest (out of 4) child is 14 and will start high school next fall. He’s a really good kid, volunteers at the library, babysits, plays sports, gets OK grades, is in the band and has good taste in friends.
The high school he will attend is the biggest in town, and while it has a good academic reputation, it also has it’s share of drugs of course. He has been in a pretty small and sheltered elementary and middle school, so I’m sure he will be exposed to a lot of things he doesn’t even know exists.
So what should I tell him about drugs and alcohol?
In band, he’s more likely to be exposed to sexuality than drugs. Most band kids are pretty good kids (I can’t count the number of band parties I went to and never saw a drop of liquor). But there is a lot of innuendo in the average conversation (particularly compared to middle school), and band kids can have a reputation for being sexually active–of course it depends on the school, but it was true in the band I was in, and American Pie parodied it for a reason. I don’t think you should *worry *about sex per se, but make sure he knows about safe sex and condoms just in case he decides to have it.
What about drugs? There’s a time and place for everything, and it’s called college. heh… anyway, if he’s the logical type, tell him that drugs and alcohol are bad for the developing brain, and the brain develops well past the age of 18. Really it’s up to any adult what they put into their body. But your son isn’t an adult yet. If he does drugs or keeps them in the house, you could get in legal trouble for it. And because of the black market the war on drugs has created, he could also fall in with bad friends if he gets into drugs. A girl I knew in high school was murdered at the age of 19 because she was at the wrong place at the wrong time–passing a joint around with her friends at their friend’s trailer (he was a dealer). Someone decided to plug the dealer, and she and 2 other girls died in the crossfire. But even if that doesn’t happen, drugs still tend to sap one’s money and motivation to get ahead in life, which could affect his grades and desire to study. You want him to get into college, so you’re just concerned that he get there as cleanly and with as good of habits as possible.
Hopefully you could also tell him that you will love him no matter what he does, though. See, many parents think that any hint of future mercy might detract from their fearmongering and cause their kids to do drugs, but that is not the case. If your kid *does *get offered drugs (or god forbid smokes a joint, etc), you want him to feel he can come to you about it–instead of hiding it from you. But you definitely won’t tolerate it under your roof, because then YOU might go to jail.
in addition to rachelellogram’s excellent points, I also told my son that he could always blame me. If he’s at a party and someone passes him a joint and he doesn’t want to smoke it? Blame me. “My mom is totally psycho and makes me take piss tests.” “No, thanks, man. My mom can smell that shit from another room!” Whatever. Make it funny, if you want. Let the other kids think you’re “cool” but not partaking just then, if that’s what you want. Just, somehow, please, say no if you don’t wanna. It’s not even about “drugs are bad”, it’s about learning how to stand up and say no when you mean no, whatever the offer is.
We also talked about how I personally didn’t smoke weed until my mid-20’s, because especially with our family history of Depression, I didn’t think it was a good idea to mess around with developing brain tissue and chemistry. Later, when I learned that marijuana’s one serious health risk is that it truly does seem to trigger the development of schizophrenia in genetically prone adolescents, I told him that, too. He tells me that those pieces of information did delay his partaking until he was almost 18. :rolleyes: Not what I would have liked to see, but these are his choices to make, ultimately. He can’t bring it in the house, I won’t pay for his college if he gets caught and can’t get financial aid, etc.
It’s a little early for him to be driving, but you should tell him that if he’s ever somewhere and the person driving is drunk or high, he should call you and you will come get him. Doesn’t matter what time. Doesn’t matter where he is. Don’t get in the car.
We’ve had all the above conversations. The call us rather than drive or catch a ride. The conversations regarding developing brains. The information that using anything can have long term health consequences. We talk about some substances being worse than others
Teach him everything there is to know about drugs. Buy a book called Buzzed. It’s a straight-to-the-point book on pretty much every drug out there, what it looks like, street names and the effects of the drug.
When I was a kid, I had a friend’s mom who was honest with us about… well, everything. She told us smoking pot wasn’t a big deal, but to stay away from drugs like crack and meth. Because she was honest with us, I took those warnings to heart. I listened to her advice, because I felt like she was treating me with respect.
She (and a few other people) also offered to come pick me up-- anywhere, anytime, and for what ever reason I felt like needed them. I knew if a party got weird and some guy was acting skeevy and my friend was drunk, there was someone I could call. And I know, kids shouldn’t get into those situations. But the thing is, until you have a little more social experience, you don’t really know how to judge when things are going to go bad. You don’t know your alcohol tolerance, so that two glasses of “punch” turns into, “Oh, shit, I can’t drive, what do I do?” Kids want to have fun, they want to be “adults”, but they don’t know how to do that. Give them a safety net, for when they screw up.
I would want to teach my kid to observe the people who use a lot of drugs and how extremely fucked up they usually are. Then I’d say “It isn’t necessarily the drugs that messed them up, but the fact that they were messed up to begin with that made them abuse drugs. On the other hand, just like how hanging out with certain people makes you behave differently, using drugs can make you behave differently, and you can easily become addicted to the feelings they give you and completely fuck up your life in the process.”
Tell him that pot is like ketchup. It’s fun and easy to enjoy, but because it’s so easy to like, a lot of people start putting it on everything, and pretty soon that’s all they enjoy: they go from “hanging out and getting high” to “getting high and and hanging out”, and whether or not they can get high (or drink or whatever) becomes the thing that decides what they do and who they spend time with. Tell them they don’t want to be a stoner anymore than they want to be the person who puts ketchup on everything: it’s not that it’s so bad to enjoy ketchup, but that it’s kind of lazy to only like the thing that is easy to like, and no one really respects that guy, even if they enjoy his company.
Also, tell him drugs are a great way to practice being the sort of person who can do what they want to do without offending everyone around them. A kid who can smoothly wave a joint on past at a party will be able to wave on past more serious things when they come up.
I would also have the conversation about knowing when to call home–that drugs are bad, yes, but that fear of getting in trouble over drugs/alcohol being present should never keep them from doing the right thing if someone is sick and needs to go to the hospital, or from calling for a ride if a situation suddenly becomes dicey, or whatever.
In my opinion, the biggest problem in teaching kids about drugs is how to deal with the fact that most of the time, drugs and alcohol feel really, really good, especially to addictive personalities. If all they hear is how drugs are bad, the first time they experiment, they are going to discover that they were misled, so maybe everything they heard from authority figures about drugs is a crock.
So how do you teach a young person that something that feels really, really good can be destructive in the long run, without triggering curiosity to find out just how good it feels?
