These days, as the mother of a 13-year-old son, Russell no longer finds the cautionary huffing so funny. A self-employed business-woman in the San Francisco Bay Area, she avoids even the occasional puff of pot. “Now I just eat,” she laughs. And though she looks back on her experiments as mostly harmless and often fun, she doesn’t want her son Jett to follow her example. To that end, she says, she has been open with him about her past, admitting that she had tried not just marijuana but also cocaine and LSD. So far, Jett is a hard-core basketball jock, and strongly anti-drug. If he did start smoking pot, Russell says, “it would concern me a little bit; I don’t know what I’d say.” She swears she would not react like her own mother. “My more came down so hard I went harder on it.”
Russell’s dilemma is one of the thornier challenges now facing the baby boom. Having celebrated drug use as a rite of adolescent passage, the Woodstock generation now has children of its own, either slogging through or approaching their teen years. And some of the parents are getting pretty, uh, uptight about it. In a recent survey of parents with teenage kids, 75 percent said they “would be upset if my child even tried marijuana,” and 77 percent said “parents should forbid their kids to use drugs at any time.” For a generation that believes it skewered anti-drug hypocrisy, this can be a source of real parental anxiety. How much should you tell your kids about your own past? When? How can you just say no, when you spent your salad days just saying yes? In short, how does the drug generation now talk to its children about drugs?
One answer is: not very effectively. After a decadelong decline, rates of teenage drug use have risen sharply in the last five years, in some cases nearly doubling. More than 41 percent of last year’s high-school seniors had tried marijuana or hashish, the highest rate since 1989. Nearly 12 percent had tried LSD. Though usage rates are still well below their peak of the late ’70s, kids seem to be experimenting earlier. More than one in five eighth graders said they used an illicit drug in the last year. And experts warn that some marijuana available today is much more powerful–up to 30 times stronger–than it was in the past. At the same time, the percentage of kids who say their parents have talked to them about drugs has dropped. Says Alan Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, “Many parents are . . . afraid that their kids will say, ‘Didn’t you try it then?’ "
Elizabeth Crown, 45, found herself in this position last month with her daughter Emily, 9. Crown smoked marijuana with her friends in the late ’60s, and says now that she doesn’t “feel totally negative about the experience.Whether right or wrong, it brought friends together. We had fun.” When Emily asked her whether she had smoked pot, she said yes. “She asked me what it did,” says Crown.“I said it makes me stupid. I told her there’s really nothing worse than feeling like you’re not in control.” She says she doesn’t feel hypo-critical about telling Emily to do as she says, not as she did. “I knew people who escalated and became addicts later, and therefore I feel that I can say, ‘It really isn’t a smart thing to do’.”
Drug counselors are divided about how much you should tell your kids about your own experiences. Leshner advises parents to shift the conversation away from themselves, especially for those who enjoyed the ride. “You have to turn it around from ‘I did it and I lived, so therefore you can do it and live’ to ‘My friend Sally didn’t live’.” Also, he says, we know more now about the harmful effects of marijuana. Child psychologist James Garbarino, director of the family-life development center at Cornell University, argues that parents should avoid telling their children too much about their own drug use, just as they wouldn’t share the details of their sex lives. “They’re in a role of authority. In general they should be cautious.” Young children especially can be confused by parents’ simplistic confessions that they used drugs. “They’ll overgeneralize,” says Garbarino. “They’ll see something on TV about crack addicts. They’ll think, ‘My parents are criminals, they’re going to go to jail, I’m going to be left behind’.”
Sarah Wenk, 38, a computer consultant in Woodstock, N.Y., has cobbled together a compromise for discussing her past experiences with her son Conor, 6. She’ll tell him the broad story now, the fine points when he gets older. Though she thinks that some drugs, used in moderation, are basically benign –“I’m in favor of pleasurable indulgences”–she also thinks her son is too young to understand the distinction. “He’s so little now. Last night I asked him what he knew about drugs. He said, ‘You can’t take drugs, they’re really really bad for you.’ I said why? He said he didn’t know.” For now, this is exactly where she wants him. “Then as he gets older, I can be less black and white. If I say drugs are bad but some aren’t as bad, he’s too young to make some of those decisions.”
The drug question can get dicier for parents who still smoke pot. A documentary filmmaker from New York, who spoke only anonymously, still likes to get high occasionally and views his drug experiences, apart from cocaine, as largely beneficial. He hasn’t raised the subject of drugs with his kids, ages 8 and 11, because he hasn’t needed to. “They’re ahead of me,” he says. “The propaganda at school is so strong that they bring the subject up. They say drugs are terrible, anybody who does them is stupid. I nod my head and say nothing, figuring in due time they will experiment.” He makes no moral distinction between marijuana and alcohol. But though he drinks in front of his two children, he wouldn’t think of lighting up. “One’s legal,” he says. “One isn’t.”
For Sarah Wenk, as for many parents, the worst scenario isn’t for their kids to try drugs-they concede that they might-but for them to be secretive about it. In this, parents’ experience can be a blessing. “If Conor is going to try things,” says Wenk, “I hope he’ll keep me posted.” The call for candor cuts both ways. Jett Russell, the basketball jock, is glad his mother told him about her past. “I think I probably would have figured it out,” he says. “I’m glad she quit when she did.”
But for all the candor and sensitivity, what many parents really want is what their parents wanted: that their kids never mess with any drug, any time. In an online discussion group for parents, which she hosts, Wenk recently arrived at what she thought was an appropriate age for Conor to experiment with drugs: 40.
14% of parents say that their teens have tried marijuana
39% of teens say they have tried it
95% of parents say they have talked to their teens about drugs
77% of teens say they have been talked to by their parents about drugs
Source: Partnership for a drug-free American. 1995
