Have you ever felt like when you talk to your high school teen your message goes in one ear and out the other? Your teen often has to balance new experiences and newfound freedoms and responsibilities, which can be overwhelming. It’s not a matter of if but when a teen will be put into situations where drugs or alcohol are present. This is why it’s so important to continue to have conversations about living a healthy, drug-free life – even if you think your message isn’t being heard.
To ensure your message is clear and effective to your high school kid, here are six tips:
1. Make sure your message is detailed and reality-driven–Don’t speak generally about drug and alcohol use. Explain how using a drug just once can have serious permanent consequences and can put them in risky and dangerous situations. Explain how anyone can become addicted.
2. Layout their future as a substance abuser - Discuss how drug use would ruin their chance of getting into college or landing their dream job.
3. Empower your teen to be a leader – Empower your teen when speaking with them. Challenge them to becoming a teen leader among their friends.
4. Use encouragement – Talk about different volunteer opportunities. Encourage your teen to be the best they can be in life. Teens tend to be idealistic and enjoy hearing about ways they can help make the world a better place.
5. Use current events as discussion openers – If you see a news story about an alcohol-related car accident, for example, talk to your teen about the victims that an accident leaves in its wake. If the story is about drugs in the community, talk about the ways your community has negatively changed as drug use has grown.
6. Give compliments – Let your teen know they are seen and appreciated because teens still care what their parents think even if they don’t always let on about it. Explain how you will be deeply disappointed if they started using drugs.
Here are a few sample conversations you can have with your high school kid based on two scenarios:
Scenario: Your high school kid comes home smelling of alcohol or cigarette smoke for the first time
What to say: “I’m really upset that you’re smoking or drinking. I need to get a handle on how often this has been happening and what your experiences have been so far. I get that you’re worried about being in trouble and that you’re experimenting, but the best thing you can do now is be straight with me, so for starters – tell me about what happened tonight.”
Scenario: Your teen has started to hang out with kids you don’t know—and dropped his old friends.
What to say: It seems like you are hanging with a different crowd than you have in the past. Is something up with your usual friends? Is there a problem with [old friends’ names] or are you just branching out and meeting some new kids? Tell me about your new friends. What are they like? What do they like to do? What do you like about them?
