Peer pressure during the teenage years is at the top of the list of factors pushing youngsters into experimenting with drugs, according to Dr. D. Vincent Biase, former director of research and development at Daytop Village, a leading drug treatment center. But it shouldn’t be blamed for drug abuse, which is usually the result of internal unhappiness in addition to the drive toward social acceptability.
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Some drugs leave an open trail. Cigarette smoke settles in hair, in clothes, and on fingertips, where a parent can smell the evidence. Inhalants often have a peculiar odor, and the containers from which they came are easy to identify. But other drug use is harder to detect.
Parents are understandably reluctant to invade a child’s private space to search for evidence, fearing they will do serious damage to their relationship. But one worried mother steeled herself to read the diary her daughter had left out on her bed. She was shocked by the sexual adventures,
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Parents try to understand today’s world through the world they experienced growing up. It won’t work. The transition from simple disciplinary problems to major police and health problem is the result not only of the passage of time but of major social upheavals.
For one thing, divorce has become a way of life, placing extra burdens on single mothers. For another, mothers, divorced or not, are out of the house and in the workplace in great numbers alongside fathers.
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Since schools are where the kids are—or should be—most of the time, they are often the setting for the discovery of the drug problem or for conflicts because of it. Parents sometimes saddle them with both the blame and the responsibility. Yet, as an administrator points out, although “the parents think the schools should crack down on drugs and the schools and cops think it is the parents’ job, the truth is, none of us can do it alone.” Essentially, the schools are responsible for what happens in school and on their grounds and the police are called in only as a last resort or if a crime has been committed. Once in a while, they go into the schools as undercover agents to expose extensive drug dealing, but in general, they stay away. Parents, on the other hand, are intimately involved with the school’s impact on their children’s lives.
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Some parents prepare to deal with their own children by recalling how they were treated by their parents and what their feelings were on the subject of drugs and drinking. First you can consider how they spoke to you, what they expected of you, how much they trusted you, and the degree to which you were consulted when it came to family decision-making. You may also be able to remember how you felt about your parents when they were setting limits or treating you in ways that you felt were unfair and frightening.
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Parents see their children as report cards on their parenting ability. When a child runs into trouble, parents torment themselves: “What did I do wrong? Was there some point when I could have done this instead of that and kept the whole mess from happening?” The truth is, children develop in a particular way because of a multitude of factors, including inborn temperament, the circumstances in which they grew up, the social climate and times in which they live, their families, and more.
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Crisis intervention centers are often community-based storefront facilities staffed mainly by nonprofessionals who have themselves been drug abusers. They are not likely to fall for the youngster who says, “I experimented just that one time,” or “I was keeping the stuff for a friend.” The centers provide emergency help, short-term treatment, and evaluation and referral. Says George Doering, Jr., director of the Ramapo Counseling Center in Spring Valley, New York, “Sometimes it’s just a question of giving a kid the opportunity to grow up with some support. For a lot of kids, four to six moths of treatment are fine.” These centers can also be used as a transition into more intensive care of for aftercare once a child has returned from inpatient treatment.
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Just as colleges are different, each community has its unique characteristics. National publications may alert you to the dangers of designer drugs or homemade PCP (angel dust), and those substances may or may not be of major concern in your area. Usually a drug fad will start on one coast or the other, and then filter to the middle of the country. But there may be local favorites, based on availability, price, and how vigorously they are being pushed.
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You probably felt reasonably sure that when your soon or daughter left for college or moved away, your household would be your own. It’s a real shock when this child, for what ever reason, turns up on your doorstep and expects to be welcomed back. Today, many adults are returning home for financial reasons, sometimes bringing all their worldly goods and their families, too. Many come home because drugs have caught up with them and they have no place else to go.
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Once their children have recovered, parents report:
“I don’t feel I have to worry about him anymore.”
“It’s great to have my own child back again.”
“She’s better than she’s ever been.”
“It was like a death and now he has a second chance.”
“As much as my son changed, I’ve changed more.”
These parents were all optimistic, yet the scorecard of achievement for treatment programs is mixed. Some studies that have looked at results show that the longer treatment lasts, the better the chance of success. There is also the grim reality, according to Dr. Ingrid Lantner, a pioneer in the field who looked at the studies as well as her own cases, that “no matter what kind of treatment is given, the success rate is about 50 percent.” It’s important to understand, though, that statistics have nothing to do with individuals, and your child has as good a chance of being among those who recover as among those who don’t. Hope is a powerful medicine that should not be discounted.
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No parent likes to acknowledge that his child might be a drug user. It seems to be an admission of failure as a parent and is a frightening recognition that something must be done. To avoid this painful possibility, parents cover up, avoid seeing what is obvious to others, or deny the extent of the problem. “Secrecy is the biggest enemy,” one father of a drug-abusing boy told Washingtonian Magazine. “In trying to keep anybody from knowing what was going on in our family, we reached the point where we didn’t know ourselves.”
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Conversations with your children have to be appropriate to the child’s age and ability to comprehend. Toddlers can be encouraged to tell you what happened at day care or a fourth-grader can discuss what he liked best in his school lunch. Later, attitudes about drinking, smoking, and taking drugs can be passed on by comments while watching television—what the experts call a “teachable moment.” A program can prompt a discussion of whether you really need to drink beer to have a good time or make friends. Or you can talk to your children about people they know and what they eat, drink, or smoke. Do so in a way that doesn’t denigrate friends or relatives and remains factual and nonjudgmental.
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As a child’s love affair with drugs progresses, the parents’ relationship goes through different stages too, from disbelief, to worry, to a recognition of the reality and feelings of anger, terror, and helplessness. By the time a child has been seduced by alcohol or drug use, parents may be constantly at odds. One denies the problem, the other recognizes it. Or both continue to feel that something is wrong but never connect the trouble to the same cause. Even when the problems’ origins are clear, dissension may persist. Blaming is part of the game.
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How will you feel when you have seen a counselor, spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of sleepless nights, had countless arguments with your husband or wife and friends, had several encounters with law enforcement agencies, and carefully selected what you thought was best—and nothing has worked? Your kid is worse than ever .He is staying out late, not showing up at school, lying, stealing, threatening to run away, and making life miserable for everyone. The treatment has not helped. This does happen, and we all have to face the reality that for some drug addicts and alcoholics there may be hope, but very little else. Until things reach some kind of equilibrium, you will have to do whatever is necessary to go on with your own life while keeping the door open for your child.
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Most parents have not practiced talking to their children about touchy subjects, and the use of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs is among the touchiest. It’s easy to talk about the weather. It’s easy to talk about the home team. It’s even easy to talk about taking turns or caring for pets. But when parents and children come to talk to one another about emotionally charged subjects, it is not easy at all. The awkwardness inherent in these situations was highlighted in the recent move The Ice Storm, when a father tells his teenage son, “If you’re worried about anything at all, just feel free to ask. And we’ll, uh, look it up.” Parents are so uncomfortable with the subject of drugs, according to Dr. Lloyd D. Johnson, director of the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future stud, that they are even less likely to talk about the problem now than in the past.
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Basically, adolescent drug abusers are treated in three different types of settings: drug-free outpatient; short-terms impatient; and therapeutic community. (For the small proportion of opiate abusers, there is also methadone maintenance—the use of a drug to block the craving for heroin, provided in an outpatient clinic. Some critics see this treatment as substituting one drug for another, but professionals generally consider it a valuable tool.) Most of these programs require that the participants also attend a support group based on the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
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Family rules and obligations are sometimes easier to enforce and abide by if you create a family contract. Your children must accept the fact that as long as they live at home, you are responsible for them. Maybe you will feel that a written document is too alien to the way you usually handle things. In that case, you can choose a part of one or use one or two items as discussion points. Even if your children think signing a contract is silly, or something neither they nor their friends would ever do, you can use the idea of spelling things out as a way of talking about concerns you might have been hesitant to approach.
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Separating is part of parenting, and the time must come, early for some, later for others, to loosen the grip so the chills can grow up. At a certain point, you are no longer responsible for your child’s life, debts, or the consequences of his or her behavior.
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Despite differing orientations and theoretical backgrounds, most treatment programs have similar goals:
- ? To help your child live a drug-free life. The general attitude, says Dr. David Smith of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, is that “once a person has crossed the boundary into uncontrollable use, she/he may never return to controlled use. It’s as if one catches the disease for which abstinence is the cure.”
- ? To help your child grow into a different person, with a better set of values and a new self-image. (Sometimes more extensive therapy is necessary to achieve this goal once the drug is out of the picture.)
- ? To help the family function more effectively.
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A few adolescents and young adults ask for help themselves because they feel so sick, guilty, or frightened that they don’t know where to run. An Illinois high school student on cocaine and alcohol went to his school counselor and said, “I think I’m going crazy. Help me.” But it is much more common to have parents propel their child into treatment while that child is still trying to con everyone into thinking there’s nothing wrong. Some kids do not give in until you are at your wit’s end.
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In addition to brothers and sisters, other people come into the picture. Grandparents can be very shocked when they learn that an adored grandchild is smoking cigarettes or using drugs. You have to tread easily with these older people, but they often need to know the truth even though they may file it away in a part of the brain that doesn’t get looked at often.
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Sometimes the force of law is necessary to get a child to accept help. A parent’s asking the court to step in and order treatment is called “creative coercion” by Peter B. Rockholz, a Connecticut social worker with more than a decade of experience in the residential treatment of young alcohol and drug abusers. “It’s important to involve the law as an ally while your child is still a juvenile,” he says. “Often we wait too long. Some kids have to be taken away from their home and friends in order to get better, and a judge can arrange this most readily before the kid has to be treated as an adult.” If the court’s order I disobeyed, the youngster can be sent to a juvenile detention facility. The message is: “Get treatment or be treated as a delinquent.”
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When a child runs away, it is like a punch in the nose, a shocking message that says, “You’re such a lousy parent, I don’t even want to live with you.” The child perceives the world away from home as a source of freedom, a carefree playground. Yet most teenagers who run away stay close to home and come back on their own.
The first time one boy ran away was “when he was eight years old. We found him hours later in a neighbor’s backyard,” his mother remembers. When he was a teenager, he climbed out a window and took off with two drug-using friends. That night he’d rebelled against his curfew and shouted, “I’m not going to live by your rules.” Many of the warning signs that a child may run away are the same as those of drug use, and the two often go together.
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Although it’s not always easy to distinguish between drug use and abuse, in young children any use is abuse and should be taken seriously. The same is true of junior high students, although the one-time experiment with beer is not necessarily a sign of worse things to come. However, if drinking or smoking marijuana is a regular part of social life in junior high, this is a sign of trouble. One drug counselor has this rule of thumb: “Three tries is experimentation. More than that is use.”
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Youngsters seem to select a particular drub because it does what they need it to do. If they are frequent users, they often have a favorite and resist switching. Some adolescents also avoid certain drugs. On a larger scale, one counselor points out that “drugs fit the times. Marijuana was a sixties drug because it makes you mellow. Coke was the eighties drug that characterizes the decade but the effect any number of drugs can produce: oblivion.
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It is a lot easier to follow suggestions such as these if you stand together with other parents. A mother from Delaware say, “I believe strongly in parents getting together for education and support. It’s the only way I have survived parenthood—that and Erma Bombeck.”
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Myths have grown out of the sixties experience. One of them is that if you don’t talk about it, it will go away. Another is that if you do talk about it, it will be okay. A bewildered mother who believed this, and whose son became seriously involved with cocaine, kept repeating, “But we communicate. We talked a lot. I don’t understand ho this could have happened.”
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In many ways, though, a youngster sees the world of drug and alcohol use from a perspective that is quite different from that of adults.
What Kids Say: What Parents Say:
Everybody’s doing it. Not my kid.
I’m not hurting anyone. This is risky behavior.
I won’t snitch on friends. I expect you to tell me the truth about what is going on.
Every time he opens his mouth
he gives me a lecture. We communicate very well.
If I had too much to drink and called
home for a ride, he’d kill me. I’d kill him.
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Often parents really don’t want to hear about their children’s experiences smoking marijuana or popping pills. They ask tentative questions (“You’re not smoking, are you?”), don’t wait for the answer, and then quickly drop the subject. Many children are consummate con artist. They tell parents what they want to hear. This combination of denial on both the parent’s and the child’s part, plus untruthfulness, keeps the whole subject under cover.
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But this is my house, and the bottom line is I won’t have it around.” You can use the same approach when it comes to other drugs. You have to be prepared for tension and even an angry “Well, then, I won’t visit anymore.”
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If such use is unacceptable to you, then you must say so unequivocally. You can point out that it is illegal, adding, “We enjoy your visits, but not your smoking.” A woman who had smoked pot herself in the sixties put is this way to her daughter: “I can’t control what you do.
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Many parents ask, “What should I do if my son lights up a joint while he’s visiting us?” First of all, be clear about your convictions before an incident occurs. If you’d rather your child didn’t hide the fact that he or she is using pot, make this plain.
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He’ll get the message when you let him know that it’s no fun for you or anyone else to have him around when he really isn’t functioning. Be prepared for an angry response, but try not to give in. Your child must learn to suffer the full consequences of his behavior.
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If your drug-using child comes to visit, he should be asked to leave if he’s high or drunk when he arrives. If he protests, tell him you’d like to spend time with him, but only when he is sober or more in control of himself.
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A “Reaching Out Room” in which these students can eat lunch and build new friendships with other recovering kids is also part of the program. This room is staffed all day, so there is always someone to talk to when the going gets rough.
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Deerfield High School in Illinois assigns each returning youngster to a student who has been back in school for a while and can act as a guide.
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You can try to hook him up with a counselor or psychologist in school or a student assistance program. Some high schools have special classes or sections for students who have been rehabilitated to provide a buffer between them and those who are still using.
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On the other hand, there will be new friends who will respect him for having turned around and will not try to underline his commitment.
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The child has learned to say no, but the temptation will be there, and a lot of it may come from students who will try to lure him back into the drug scene or make fun of him for having been caught or for going “straight.”
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One youngster said, “It’s not as hard to go home as it is to go back to school.” He’s right, because in school, your child will once again be with the kids with whom he did drugs.
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But what seems like rebellion may really be a child’s way of saying, “I don’t know who I am, but this I do know—I am not you. I’m different.” The child rejects parental attitudes and expectations on the road to developing his own ideas and personality.
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