Have a New Kid by Friday - Dr Kevin Leman [53]
“Anita’s always been a good student. Then she entered junior high. Her grades started to drop—not just a little but a lot. Now she’s staying out really late with friends, she’s mouthy, and she doesn’t get up until afternoons on the weekends. Then she still looks blearyeyed. What happened to my good girl?”
The use and abuse of drugs and alcohol is nothing to mess around with. This is a mountain and a situation you have to address immediately. If your child has been a good or average student, and all of a sudden in seventh to tenth grade you see her grades drop off the table, welcome to the world of marijuana. Smoking pot will rob a kid of motivation quicker than anything else. A lot of kids smoke pot—even teens you would call “good kids.” And here’s the kicker: once a teen starts smoking pot, his body starts craving that high more and more.
The same thing is true with alcohol use. So many teens start drinking beer at parties to be “cool” and one of the group. Then their bodies and minds start requiring the “relax mode” that alcohol puts them in. As one girl put it, “When I drink, I can escape who I am and be someone else. I’m not uptight anymore. I’m the life of the party, and everyone likes me.”
And that’s exactly why teens use drugs and alcohol:
1. To escape who they are or their life situation (whether at home, school, or both).
2. To be popular—part of the “in crowd”—and well liked.
But such stimulants are only a quick fix, not the answer to a teen’s unhappiness or insecurity. Even worse, drug and alcoholuse becomes addicting. Just ask anyone in AA who has struggled for years to come out of addiction.
If you find out (or even suspect) your child is drinking or using drugs, ask yourself these important questions:
1. Where is my child getting the money for alcohol and drugs? Perhaps he’s getting it from you, through his allowance or the extra money he begs from you. If so, now’s the time to cut off the supply, since it’s only aiding his habit. For a while he may be able to bum money off his friends, but that won’t last long.
2. Do my children know if I smoke pot or do any other drugs? If they do, they’re going to see your use of drugs as the green light that they can party with their friends, smoke pot, shoot up, snort this or that—whatever comes. By using drugs yourself, you’re giving your child blind permission to do so too.
This kind of story happens in homes across America every day. It happened to Danelle, as her story shows:
“My dad had a Scotch every day when he came home from work, and then he had another one after dinner,” Danelle told me. “So I grew up thinking that’s just what you did when you were an adult. When I turned 11, I wanted to be just like my dad. Everybody seemed to like him because he was fun to be around . . . at least when he was around. So I started taking sips from his Scotch bottle when I got home from school. I’d sneak it from his den liquor cabinet while my mom was making dinner. I just filled it up a little with water so nobody would know I was doing it.”
Danelle continued doing so until she became an alcoholic at age 13. It wasn’t until she was 15, when she was caught with older friends at a bar, that her family even found out she drank. Her mother was shocked, her father was embarrassed (he was, after all, on the board of their church), and Danelle ended up needing to go to a rehab facility to dry out.
Even more, she discovered at the rehab center that she was pregnant. She didn’t know who the father was because she’d had an encounter with him when she was drunk.
The baby was born premature with fetal alcohol syndrome. A doctor and his wife, who knew the complications that could result from drinking while pregnant, ended up adopting the baby and footing the medical bills. Danelle lost a year of high school due to complications with the pregnancy and her resulting depression. She began her junior year in a different high school so she could start fresh and make new friends.
Today Danelle is in her late twenties and works at a center for alcohol-addicted