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.

Fifth grade seems to be a particularly good time to talk with children about what is troubling them. At that time they want to talk to you. By sixth grade, they are really worried about alcohol. Concerns probably peak at that age because these kids are on the threshold of junior high school, where they know pressures to drink and use marijuana will increase dramatically. Seventh-grade children (beginning adolescence) start to be more secretive. They don’t want anyone to know what goes on. They all try to sit unnoticed in the last row in a classroom.

Even if you’ve talked to your children through the years, you have to keep repeating the same messages over and over again in different ways. This takes ingenuity. What you say must continue to reflect what they can understand. At times they may not seem to be listening, but they are absorbing your attitudes and ways nevertheless.

It’s best to begin this process while your children are very young, since it is hard to communicate about sensitive topics with a defensive teenager who has never developed a feeling of give-and-take with his parents. By the time you say, as one father did, “My son is seventeen. He smokes pot every day. What do I do now?” it may be much harder to start a dialogue. You may need to get outside help to guide you in dealing with the situation.

But even if it is late for him, it is not late to start talking to your younger children. By developing an atmosphere of openness, you might be able to protect the younger ones from repeating the experiences of the older children in the family. This does not mean that you should hold up the older ones as villains or failures, or give up on them. In fact, it will be best to omit comparisons and focus on what goes on in the present.

When a pediatrician asked his ten-year-old son to describe himself, starting with “I’m Bill,” the boy wrote: “My father is a doctor. My mother works in the PTA. My sister is a pain.” He defined himself in terms of his family with very little awareness of his own qualities. At that age he was still tied to concrete thinking, dealing with what existed in the present rather than with the anticipation of the future. When you talk to a young child you can’t say, “If you smoke you’ll have lung cancer in forty years.” He may believe you, but the simply cannot worry about what might happen in years to come. You have to stick to the immediate and then you will be heard. “If you drink too much, you’ll feel awful.”

Bill’s teenage sister, on the other hand, when asked to describe herself wrote, “I’m pretty. My hair is long and brown. I’m going to be a dancer when I grow up.” Perhaps she was something of a pain. But she had a vision of herself as a unique individual, and she was able to project herself into the future. This difference in the ability to abstract may reflect real structural differences in the brain, and that slow maturational process must be taken into account as you communicate with your children.