How To Raise Your Daughter To Be A Drug Free Designated Driver

spring-breakers-party

I would imagine that being a parent of teenagers only grows more terrifying with each passing year and season of Pretty Little Liars. The world is basically one giant electric socket for your teen to stick a fork into, and teens seem to just run around with forks in hand, ready to get shocked. That analogy sounded better in my headmaybe I stuck too many forks into too many sockets in my teen years.

I’ve seen enough Lifetime movies titled something along the lines of It Only Takes One Time: The Jaime Lipshutz Story to know that drugs are quite possibly the most exciting things on earth for your teens (outside of oral sex and sexting, duh), and they’re also the MOST DANGEROUS. Don’t think I don’t understand gateway drugs. I know about the slippery slope.

Luckily, however, I did not fall victim to the slippery slope; that gateway was firmly closed to me. In high school, I was the person you called to pick you up. Want to experiment with hallucinogenics? Call me if you’re flipping outI’ll be sober as a judge. I wasn’t one of those straight edge kids because I had friends and was not a big dweeb, but I just didn’t get involved with any of that drug life the kids were in on. My high school drinking was pretty tame (with one notable exception involving offering blow jobs to most people in a roomthey elegantly declined). It wasn’t a conscious decision, but instead the accidental result of my parents’ unorthodox approach to that whole drug thing. If you want to raise a drug free, designated driver, you can follow their four easy steps.

Step 1. Give Your Children Crippling Anxiety

As my sister deadpans, ”If you want your kids to avoid drugs, give them the gift of anxiety. Then, they’ll never have fun.” It’s true. Through a mix of nature and nurture, we were bred to revile fun and instead enjoy things like hyperventilating or obsessing. Being anxious meant being too afraid to try new things, because we believed that any new activity would bring on more anxiety. This severely limited the appeal of drugs in our teen years.

Step 2. Provide Misinformation

My parents aren’t liarsI think they got swept up in a lot of the hysteria of the media coverage about drugs in the early 90s that was based primarily on fear. These rumors got twisted into our brains as facts, and drugs were ruined for us forever.

In addition to that, they were big on using anecdotes and personal experiences as fact, as well. While never explicitly saying ”drugs will kill you,” my mom would pepper stories of her drug use as a freewheeling Vietnam protester with tales of abject horror. At a concert, she hallucinated an animal’s head onto her boyfriend’s shoulders, but otherwise it was ”so fun! Even though I thought I was about to die and was absolutely terrifiedI mean screaming and crying. Experimenting is great!”

As such, I thought the following things about drug taking, due to my parents’ passed along misconceptions and anecdotal evidence.

  • River Phoenix OD’d in his first, I mean first drug experience
  • Drugs, even ones meant to calm you down, will in fact have the opposite experience (my sister finds herself too anxious to take even a Xanax during a panic attack and paper-bags it)
  • Most recreational drugs these days are laced with arsenic, anthrax, rat poison, or whatever people are most scared of at the moment

Step 3. Remain Questionably Silent About Other Ways Of Coping With Teen Angst
Drugs and alcohol are the not the only self destructive tendencies a high schooler might find herself in, and boy did I ever. Teens have to exorcise their angst somehow, and so if you close off one door, you have to leave some others open (sex, cigarettes, fight clubs, who knows what those sons of bitches get themselves into). This might not be a great idea.

Step 4. Use Embarrassing Terminology
Drugs sort of lose their appeal when you constantly hear them referred to as grass, dope, ‘roids, speed, and poppers. This might be the most effective tool I can recommend.

I love drugs. I don’t do them but I think they’re wonderful if you’re into it. You could say I’m a wistful, wannabe stoner. We all have our dreams, but alas, my parents’ techniques were oddly effective and when I got up the courage to try smoking (and try and try again), bad things happened. It was a self fulfilling prophecy. On the upside, I conquered drinking and do that very well.

There are better ways to handle this. I do not recommend intentionally raising anxious head cases because you will certainly run into problems down the line. Sure, they might be drug free, but years of therapy might cost as much as rehab. I would imagine that communication mixed with mutually agreeable boundaries work better, because not every parent is blessed enough to birth children debilitated by their anxiety. If your kid likes fun things and isn’t too anxious to try, I would have a serious talk about risks, safe ways to experiment, and please, for the love of god, tell them that if they call you too debilitated to drive, that you will always go and pick them up. I called my parents to pick me up once when I was home from college, and I was embarrassed, but I was safe. They were even happy I calledthey didn’t give me an ounce of shit and even told me they were proud of my decision-making.

I visited home last week andbeing unused to not having public transportationgot too drunk to drive. I somehow convinced my parents to pick me up and drive to me In-N-Out at 1AMto be fair, they were already up and will never pass up an In-N-Out trip. Rock bottom as it may be to drunkenly get a ride from your parents as a grown up and not a 19-year-old, my parents were still happy to protect me, and enjoyed the burgers. I don’t ever drive drunk, ever, and I’ll always pick anyone up who needs it. My parents got that part right.

Despite all my jokes about raising a kid who thinks pot is a neurotoxin or has crippling anxiety, my only real advice is this: your kid is going to experiment, and the more off-limits experimentation is, the harder they’ll go for it. Offer to be there for your kid when he or she asks for help.

Photo: Spring Breakers (2013)

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