teach your children

taken from my notes, assessments in addictions counseling - 2/10/05

* a 2004 survey by the national center on addiciton and substance abuse compared a group of u.s. teens who claim none of their friends are sexually active with a group of teens who report at least half their friends are sexually active. that latter group was found to be:

• more likely to have tried alcohol (66% vs. 10%)
• more likely to have gotten drunk in the past month (31% vs. 1%)
• more likely to have tried marijuana (45% vs. 2%)
• more likely to have tried cigarettes (45% vs. 8%)

* more time spent with boyfriends/girlfriends was also correlated with substance use.

bottom line? know what your kids are doing, who they are doing it with. we discussed last night whether marijuana was a *gateway* drug - in other words, does marijuana use lead to using other drugs? after reading and discussing the above information, it is felt that perhaps being sexually active at a young age could be the *leading gateway drug* but nobody realizes how harmful it can be and how much else it can lead to (and we thought disease was the only by-product, huh parents?)

if i have any advocates of teaching proper birth control techniques vs. total abstinence at the junior high and high school levels, i'd love to hear what your comments are on the above. all of this has to do with engaging in risk behavior, in other words, taking a risk at doing something you know might be an inherently dangerous thing to do. Isn't engaging in a sin like that? you know you shouldn't do that *thing* but it starts by stepping up to that line. then over the line, "just one time." initially the effects aren't really so far-reaching, are they? sort of like "phew, dodged a bullet there" but then something happens. you decided to do it just one more time. it becomes easier and easier each and every time to go back to it, time and again. then suddenly, what began as *just once* has become a full blown (probably sinful) activity and what was once not such a bad thing to do has become an almost impossible thing to disengage from.

then you start looking around you and realize the complications and implications are so out of control, you wish you had never started walking toward that line in the first place.

be intrusive with your children. be like those "parents - the anti-drug" ads you see on television. you may not be able to stop every experimental thing they try in your absence, but yours might just be the voice they hear in their heads when they may be walking up toward that line and decide to turn around and go the other way.