preemptive drug testing

[SoonerTexan]

The new thing here is these I love boobies breast cancer bracelets.

I'm all for breast cancer awareness, but I've always given those and the t-shirts the side eye and question the motivation--especially when I see them on certain guys...

Anywho...back to the topic at hand

[peggyfromwastate]

A couple of weeks ago I took Luanne's advice and asked Kate what she thought. She was not offended about the idea. I told her there was a company pushing home drug testing kits for parents to use to test their kids BEFORE they even suspected their kids were using. I said the premise was that if the teens knew their parents were testing for drugs, the testing would help the kids resist peer pressure when and if it hits.

Kate's opinion:

Most of the kids she knows who use drugs get them from their parents or older sibs and their parent(s) know about the drug use. (Point 1 for Jenn)

For the kids whose parents know their kids are using but are getting the drugs from friends or dealers, she says the parents just don't care, so the drug testing wouldn't even happen. She says these kids are looking for some kind of parent involvement, some kinds of rules, just... anything. And the parents are so absorbed in their careers, etc., that they just have the attitude *Teens, they'll grow out of it...*

As far as the peer pressure issue- I told her to go ahead and tell her friends if she's in the situation that her parents would *make her life very difficult* should she ever use drugs. As in military school difficult. We've already shown her the private school she'll be going to if she starts cutting again (it's very very small, Christian, super restrictive, and she would hate it b/c there's no diversity and only about 20 kids per grade!!!) Kate said that she already knew that, and her friends know that we wouldn't stand for it, so...

Ultimately, she rolled her eyes at the whole concept. She thought that for the kids who are going to get into drugs, the drug testing (or the threat of drug testing) won't do anything to deter it. (Like Kris said, it's all about the peer group. That reigns supreme over the risk of what your parents may do to you... in a teen's mind, they can always run away from home and live the glorious life of a rock groupie, right?) She thought the kids who care if their parents trust them and are afraid to use drugs because they'd be screwing up their parent/child relationship wouldn't benefit from the testing, because they wouldn't get into drugs in the first place due to the fear they already have of what their parents would do. (This is probably closest to how Kate is).

so, to a 14 year old who is starting to see many of her friends experiment, she thinks the drug testing is a waste of money. Interestingly, she said that if we wanted to test her, she wouldn't care. She wouldn't feel like we didn't trust her. She would just feel like we were being taken (SUCKERS!).

Kate's x-boyfriend from last year (one of the winners) is in 9th grade now and was just *arrested* (or whatever they can do to a 15 year old) for possession at his high school. He had a cocktail of drugs in his locker. He gets his drugs from ??? We aren't sure. But his dad's a user, and has been forever. This boy started smoking at age 10 probably (dad's ciggies) and drinking about then (dad's booze). He's been trying to get his dad to pay attention to him. Kate says this boy won't stop using drugs because he likes it too much. He says he won't give it up, even though the juvi system is sending him to a rehab clinic as a punishment for his possession charge. When Kate was his *GF* last year, he was just starting pot. He's come a long way in a year... Kate is slowly starting to see how his choice to use drugs is so self-destructive, and it's never going to achieve what the boy says he wants: for his dad to give a damn. I said if this boy actually chose to be clean, to work his arse off in school, to make a career of himself. THAT is the way to get back at the world... But to fulfill the stereotype and BECOME the same man your dad is... That's only screwing yourself. It's so sad.

Why do young teens have so much crap to deal with, along with this idea that nothing can touch them.

[houseelf]

it's all about the peer group. That reigns supreme over the risk of what your parents may do to you

I hope you don't mind me rambling off into a tangent, but I really think there is something to this. In the book Nurtureshock, the authors found that getting a kid into an honors dorm or having roommates who were conscientious students was more correlated with student success than matriculation at a certain college. Apparently peer influence reigns supreme well into early adulthood.

Further, my neighbor across the street swears that one of her biggest parenting mistakes was allowing her youngest to get out of the AP/honors classes. She didn't care about the grades as much as the norms and cultural values of the peer groups. Looking back, she said she would have preferred Cs and Ds to a daily influence of pot and sex.

I'm not sure I'm totally on board with this (and I'm sure Fluff's eyes just goggled out of his head) but I think there is a seed of truth to this line of thinking.

/rambling tangent over

Kelly

[fluffhead]

Yeah, from a teacher's POV having an unqualified kid in an AP class is _such_ a hassle. And from the kid's POV, what a blow to the ego to be pulling poor grades among all these overachievers!
I don't get it, but whatever. Seems to me that if the parent is worried about the influence of other children, she should pull her child out of the school.

[peggyfromwastate]

I'm glad to hear your perspective from this Fluff. I opted to NOT put K in the *fast track* for math next year (that woudl be a pre-calc class instead of Algebra 2) even tho, amazingly, I had that choice. She's in geometry this year and it is a struggle. Math with her is always a huge struggle. So, she's going a more normal route and I'm hoping she's going to gain confidence from this. I did fall for the *must be in the right peer group* philosophy for her 6th grade math, and it totally screwed her up. We are barely recovering. The math was just too hard for her. She should have been in the advanced level for 6th, not the super-advanced she was in. But the class she was in for 6th was not even the most advanced available. And I had the choice to put her in whichever one I wanted-- the teachers were really not able to tell me where she belonged.

I did let her go to an AP class (for history) next year because she wanted to do it. This is pretty amazing for her bc she's unmotivated when it comes to school. But she wanted to do AP, so ok, we'll give it a try.

Anyway, we know enough kids in the fast track college prep classes who are dabbling in drugs to know that it's pervasive. I do think there's something to say about peer group, tho. So it's a hard situation. Parenting is just not black and white. Not at all...

[Sheherezade]

Agreed. I think the only social pressure you can depend on within the honors group is that the parents care about the grades. Hopefully, this translates in to the kids caring about the grades, too. Still, you can care about your grades and do bad things to get them. All the bad things mentioned (drugs, risky sex, drinking) that are not grade related probably also happen in the honors group, too. I'd say that here they do -- but not in as high a frequency as in the non-honors cliques. We have some genuine wholesome nerds. Love them.

[peggyfromwastate]

as an all-honors kid growing up there were tons of drugs and sex going on among those kids as well. The big difference between the honors and non-honors kids was if college was an expectation or a "maybe". Otherwise - i learned a lot of really bad stuff from my honors class peers in high school.

ita

ITA. I've know plenty of all honors kids who could maintain fine GPAs with a little extracurricular bad behavior. At my school it was very popular to be a good kid by day and party like a rock star on the weekends. Honestly, I declined the drugs solely because I thought I might want to be president some day. And with that I clearly date myself as having gone to high school in an era when past drug use was a political liability. Seriously though, maybe that's part of the problem for teens now -- is there less long-lasting social stigma associated with drug use?