from Teen Help.
According to a study in 1996, 50.8% of High School Seniors have tried drugs, and 24.6% have used in the last 30 days.
from Monitoring the Future Study, 1975 - 1996,
National Institute on Drug Abuse
Take a good look at that second statistic again.
Do you have more then one teen in your home? If so, the odds are that one of them has tried one drug or another. Do you know three of your teen's friends? Can you tell which one has done some type of drug in the last thirty days? The odds are one has.
Guess what? The problem is worse than what these odds are telling you, because these odds are based on teens who have admitted to doing drugs. You and I know how hard it is to get our teens to admit to anything. It would be interesting to see how much higher the percentages would go up if we could find a way to truly measure teenage drug use.
I brought up these statistics because I found two very interesting trends in the raw data of our Drug Survey. One, 25% of parents still don't feel the need to ask their children if they have tried drugs.
(Hhhhmmm....stepping up on soap box...) An once of prevention ... (No, I don't preach... Instead I subscribe to Agatha Christie's way of thinking, 'Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.')
Ask your teen. Don't accuse, just ask. You need to open this line of communication, so your not grasping at threads if this does become a problem. Talking about drugs is good, but asking a direct questions, such as, 'How do you feel about drugs? Are you curious, have you ever wanted to experiment with them? Have you ever had the opportunity?', will go a lot further. This isn't a matter of trust, your not asking because you don't trust them. Your asking because you don't trust the Lifestage they are in. Teens are not always capable of making good decisions. Let me see if I can put this in terms we all remember.
Turn back the clock, your teen is now a happy little toddler again. Playing in his room, having a grand old time emptying out his toys on the floor. He looks up and see something very interesting, walks over to it, puts his hand on it, tries to take it off the wall, and... well, there's no ZAP! Because you thought of this beforehand and placed covers on your electric sockets. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it were still this easy?
The second trend I saw is that 72% of parents do not feel there is anything they can do to stop their teens from trying drugs, yet 77% feel there is help after drugs become a problem for their teen.
We need to change this. We need to empower ourselves as parents, thereby empower our children to lead safer lives, BEFORE THERE IS A PROBLEM. We need to feel confident, so we can pass that confidence on to them. Yes, its a big bad world out there, but Your World is in Your Home, and Your family structure IS capable of warding off society's worst nightmares.
The 'power' of empowering starts with knowledge. The more you know about what faces your teen, the better equipped you are to handle it. In light of this, I have placed the wealth of information from the Web in my library of links, under Drug Use.
