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The big question: How do you talk to this child about drugs?
East Valley Tribune
When Tiffany Dayton, 14, and Stephanie Dayton, 11, go to their pantry for a snack or for the ingredients to make dinner, they are reminded not to do drugs. At the front of the shelf, at eye level, there is a box that doesn’t contain food — it’s a home drug-testing kit. It remains unused. But the girls know that their parents could choose to test them. And that is a pretty convincing deterrent.
"I know a lot of people, my friends, they don’t want to use drugs, but peer pressure is really hard,” says Tiffany. “You really have to learn how to tell people you aren’t interested.”
When Craig Dayton first brought the kit into the family’s Chandler home, he placed it on the counter, walked away and waited to get everyone’s attention. Right away, his oldest daughter noticed it.
“She picked it up, looked at it and said, ‘Oh, cool. When do I get to try it?’ ” he recalls. “I knew then and there that I didn’t have a problem.”
“I thought it was pretty cool,” says Tiffany. She opened the box to examine the small plastic cup, with its top that changes colors to indicate what, if any, drugs are in your system. “I wanted to see how it works.”
Dayton says having the kit in such a prominent place in the home has helped the family to regularly talk about drug use and abuse. The conversation started when the girls were in elementary school. He tells the girls that if they are ever caught using, not only will he call the parents of the friends they were with, but also the police.
“Not to get them in trouble,” he says, “but to get them help.”
Tiffany says she is completely comfortable talking with her parents about drugs, and having the test at home is a relief. She says she doesn’t see her dad’s warnings as threats, but as a way of supporting her and her sister.
In fifth grade, Tiffany went through the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program at school and said she learned about how drugs can be harmful.
To some parents Dayton’s approach might seem like tough love, or even an invasion of privacy, but he says it’s his way of keeping his girls safe.
Studies have shown that the average age kids try alcohol is 11 and drugs is 12, with some kids trying them much younger.
Those numbers have spurred public service campaigns and educational programs that encourage parents to talk to even their youngest kids about drugs, but what to say remains the question in many minds.
“Kids hear a lot in rumorville, and they feel like experts,” says Stephanie Kreiling, an educator for Community Bridges of Mesa, a drug abuse prevention organization. “But they don’t want to showcase this expertise to parents for fear that they will appear to know too much. At the same time, parents feel that they don’t know much about what’s out there and don’t want to show their ignorance to their kids,” she says. “The result is that no one talks about it.”
Not talking about it is the worst thing you can do, say local experts.
“You have to bring it up. You can’t just wait,” Kreiling says.
Before the sixth grade, children see issues as black and white, and if you talk to them about drugs, she says, they will see that abusing them is wrong. As they get older, things get a little gray.
“In elementary school, you have your most captive audience,” says Kreiling. “Kids will really listen to you, at least up until that point.”
Dayton got his home drugtesting kit after participating in a program in the Kyrene Elementary School District called Project 7th Grade (although the kits are now available at many drugstores for about $30). The project is part of the nonprofit education and outreach program NotMYKid, which aims to educate parents about drugs and teach them how to talk about them with their kids.
“It’s cool that it’s available to parents,” says Tiffany. “Parents don’t learn as much as we do about drugs.”
Debbi Moak of Phoenix started NotMYKid after her own family struggled with drug use, and the program has since gone nationwide, educating parents on issues from drug use to depression to eating disorders.
Moak says parents need to talk early and often to kids about drugs, but need to first get educated on the subject themselves.
“Parents believe they know today’s drugs,” she says. They may think the marijuana available today, for example, is the same as what was on the streets in the 1960s, but she says it’s not.
“Know what it looks like,” she says, “know what kids look like who are on it, know what the paraphernalia looks like.”
Moak says every family should have a drug prevention plan to spell out how they will work together to make sure drugs are not abused.
“Kids are under so much pressure, and we have the opportunity to eliminate some of it. We need to stand up and protect our kids on every level,” she says.
Through Moak’s program, drug-testing kits have been distributed to a couple thousand East Valley families. Educators with the program travel to area schools and meet with groups of parents, talking with them about drugs and teaching them what they need to know to keep their kids from using.
Moak says the drug kits are one tool parents can use. “I think our kids are looking at us to set boundaries. You prevent kids from getting poor grades by making sure they study, by looking at their report card. But what are we doing, when it comes to drugs, to verify that those doors aren’t being opened?”
Start by explaining to young children that even medicines that are in the home to make you feel better can hurt you.
“Say, ‘You see that medicine in the cabinet, you don’t want to take too much of it,’ ” says Kreiling. “Even very young kids understand that.”
Kreiling and Moak encourage parents to use current events to start drug talks.
“If there is a drug bust on the nightly news, ask them, ‘Has that ever happened at school, that someone has been caught with drugs?’ ” says Kreiling. “That’s an indirect and not threatening way to do it.”
Moak says to emphasize the consequence for using drugs — for instance, being arrested. She also advocates using a reward system for kids who don’t use drugs — for instance, providing them with a cell phone for as long as they stay drug-free.
And what if kids ask the question dreaded by many parents who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s: “Have you done drugs?”
Kreiling says she understands both telling them you have and, if you have, telling them you haven’t.
“The important thing to remember is that you are the parent now. If you don’t want to tell them, don’t. If you do, don’t go into detail and don’t glamorize it.”
What about riffling through sock drawers and peeking under the mattresses?
“Parents are worried about an invasion of privacy, but they shouldn’t be because it is their home,” says Kreiling. “Hopefully, you’ve been setting boundaries all along and your children understand they can’t hide things from you there.
“It’s your right to question them,” she says. “If you don’t find anything, that’s where you build trust, I think.”
www.NotMYkid.org
www.health.org
www.drugfree.org
www.drugfreeaz.org |
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