Does Your Child Know When to Call 911? Are You SURE?

This week, an amazing story was posted on the LA Times site “A Teen Party, a Mysterious Death — and a Town’s Unanswered Grief.” It really brought home the message that we, as adults, can and often do underestimate what our kids know. For the safety of your children, I highly recommend you read the article and then go talk to your children about what you learned.

The article makes three very important points:

1. Underestimating what your child knows about drugs can be deadly.
2. Make sure your child really understand when to call 911.
3. Always pay attention to where your child is going and what they are doing.

After all the work we have done in schools, after the hundreds of thousands of students we have talked to and surveyed, we know that many many kids have no clue how dangerous drugs really are. It’s true! And though you would be right to think that after all the threats of punishment, warnings, horror stories and the scary pictures they are shown in health class that they must know about the danger that awaits them — they don’t.

Why? Why don’t they get it? It’s not bad genes, I assure you. We as adults process information in a different way than children do. We see things differently and we have a lot of personal experience that we can use to draw conclusions from. So when you see someone dying of cancer, to you that’s real! You probably know several people who have died of cancer. But for a child it’s different. I remember when the first person I personally knew died — I might have been about 13 years old at the time — and I thought, “Wow! It’s finally happening. I am getting older because someone I know has died.”

Children don’t have the advantage of personal experience and they need basic data — not scary pictures — to put in their memory banks. They need factual and easy to understand information that is explained in a down to earth manner that does not insult their intelligence. And it has to be realistic and they have to be able to relate to it. People with holes in their throat because they smoked are not real to a child. I mean, honestly, how many people have you met with holes in their throat?

More often than not, we find that children don’t understand what a drug is. Talk about basic! I would bet that if you now asked ten people what is the definition of the word “drug” they would not be able to tell you. Students often tell us, when we ask them to define the word, that it means “something bad”. True. But what is it? You know what a book is. You know what an apple is. So what is a drug?

Well in case you are not sure yourself what the definition of the word is, here are two references that together give you a complete definition

1. “Ten Things Your Friends May Not Know About Drugs” — Page 4

2. FDA – How does the law define a drug? — Third paragraph

In defining basic terms and explaining basic information about drugs, we find that children respond very well. They feel empowered and often tell us that they finally understand WHY drugs are harmful and that they are no longer curious about how it feels to take drugs. And they feel more able to take a stand and not just go with what their friends tell them. Peer pressure is a real thing but it cannot overcome personal certainty. If you know something and you are sure you know it, it would take a lot of work to convince you otherwise, wouldn’t it?

So be proactive and learn all you can about how to talk to children about drugs and how to help them understand the dangers. Believe me, the truth of the old adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” has never been more true than in the world of teen drug abuse.

And lastly, I want to make a special mention of the journalist that wrote the LA Times Article,
Maura Dolan. What an amazing job she did of telling the story. It’s a real gift to be save lives with the written word. If you appreciate the article, let her know: maura.dolan@latimes.com