should you ever tell your kids you smoke weed?

today my son asked 'dad, have you ever been high?'

uhhhhh way to put me on the spot there, son

he just started secondary school - he's 11 - and he says 'drugs are all anyone talks about'. alright. he's exaggerating but still.

my parents were both raised comparatively conservatively. in my dad's case, very much so - his dad was a methodist minister and teetotaller. we never talked about drugs, or sex, or drinking. with them, i pretended like the subjects didn't exist.

i'm of two minds about that. first, like... it's no fun if your parents know what you're doing, is it? isn't sneaking smokes and drinks foundational?

on the other hand.. i feel like i can be helpful here? maybe?

I was pretty matter-of-fact about it with my daughter, getting more into the physical effects, what's pleasant and what's unpleasant, etc. Taking a lot of the mystery and taboo out of it has worked to not create an overindulger in her case. She's a light drinker and says she might try w33d someday, psychedelics mmmmmaybe but probably not, but is in no hurry.

he's sure as hell going to talk to the kids at school about weed and god knows what crazy shit they'll tell him. if you talk about it with him, at least he'll have a source of info he will (possibly) trust better than a bunch of 11 year old kids. you have that adult who knows things aura going for you. the trick is to rob it of some of its glamor and mystery, but believably. kids can usually detect how much varnish has been applied to the truth. good luck. no way is there a foolproof recipe for this shit.

yes, you never know when you're gonna need to buy from them

i will probably never have a kid, but if i did, well...haha, i guess it would depend a lot on the kid. but if they were anything like me, i think i would want to be honest with them and just tell them that yeah, i had done it a few times (lol), and there were good things about it and bad, but that it's an especially bad idea for kids because of _pseudosciencey thing about developing neural pathways being especially vulnerable to the chemicals released by etc_

but i don't know. maybe it's common for everyone to believe that their kid is a good, honest, fearless kid who just isn't interested in drugs, so you convince yourself you never actually need to say anything because they're not interested in the first place. or maybe it's more common, by that point, to just let them figure it out by themselves, kind of like tossing a toddler in a pool to teach them to swim.

anyway my real answer is yes, if they ask I will tell them what they need to know, and nothing more

we have talked a great deal about drugs including my experiences with them, which are 25 years in the past and rare even then except for booze which I do still have on occasion but that they can see.

I think it’s good to talk about it because yeah at school they’re gonna hear n’importe quoi

sex is much weirder to talk about because usually we’re all talking together and it’s weird to be explicit about the things I’ve done with their mom who is sitting right there

God yes, just be honest about the good things and the bad. You're not likely to set an example because a rebellious adolescent isn't going to do what mom or dad did anyway. I told my daughters in their teens, yeah I've smoked weed a bunch of times, it occasionally did great things for me, I lost interest when I realised I pretty much stopped enjoying it. Kids can smell bullshit a million miles away. What will make the difference of whether they're careful with drugs, is if they feel you respect them and care for them, and being honest about that is a very good case study.
In the case of my daughters they now tell me occasionally about friends trying drugs etc so I feel like the conversation is open. You're never going to be there when they decide to try something, but how they think you will react is a huge part of whether they will call you for help if something's not OK.

my brother started smoking weed when he was 12 and when he was 14 he had a really scary experience when he was on antibiotics - his pals dared him to eat a Fruit Corner yoghurt where the compote had been replaced by weed. He fell comatose for a few hours and his pals didn't know what to do so they just carried him from the field they were hanging out in, up to our house where nobody was home, and dumped him on the bed and ran away. Teenagers will do silly things with other teenagers and I think the best you can do is make sure that your teenager is the one who can push down on the brakes from a place of informed confidence.

yeah that kind of shit terrifies me

I brought this up on 77, but I found out that my son was using drugs when he told me that he thought he was dying in the middle of a bad acid trip at age 14. My wife and I had talked to him a little about drugs, mainly that there are a lot of downsides to using drugs at a young age - even pot - but that pot was the safest and that alcohol was one of the worst. Just based on his personality and some behavior that we had seen from him, we didn't really trust him enough to sit down and be totally open about things.

Looking back, I wish we had been more in-depth with him before he had the chance to fuck things up on his own (he went back and had several more bad acid trips! kid, the hunter s. thompson lifestyle just ain't for you), but I still don't really know what I should have said to him. For instance, I could have given him some basic pointers about how to avoid a bad acid trip, but without knowing that he was planning on doing it, I wasn't comfortable with potentially putting the idea in his head. I think the big problem was that since he never asked, my wife and I weren't going to bring it up. We are more open with him about drugs now and we made an agreement to mostly look the other way about pot smoking as long as he lays off the other drugs and keeps his grades up.

wondering how this is going for you these days peace, man ^

i remember starting this thread. the 11 yo is now 14. he has apparently been googling 'blunt papers'. he was also looking for books in the house 'with thin pages' because he was 'interested'. this morning we noticed our lighter had gone missing. so, uh, yeah.

How old were you when you started?

16?

But only v occasionally

I knew guys who were smoking every day by age 15

what's the scientific consensus on how much it affects development in your teens? I believe my parents let me smoke my first one for my 16th birthday.

recent research suggests it hastens the thinning of the prefrontal cortex that naturally occurs during adolescence. these are only animal studies afaik.

wondering how this is going for you these days peace, man ^

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, January 11, 2023 5:08 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ugh, it's been a saga. There are a lot of other elements to it. He's 18, working six days a week, dropped out of community college after two weeks. He sorta owns our garage as his smoking/drinking den in his off-hours. He is definitely dependent on weed and beer, but doesn't push his limits as much with the alcohol and to my knowledge has stayed away from hallucinogens or other substances for the past few years. He ended up puking his brains out on New Years Eve - but that was the first time in a long time I'd seen him take it too far.

Over the years, it has been shown that - between him, his mom, and myself - we have such completely distinct personalities and ways of solving problems that I just don't bother with the weed and drinking anymore. I'm resigned to this being a fact of life about him. When he was a minor, his mom and I were always back and forth about whether he would benefit from therapy/treatment of some sort. As in, when she was pushing for sending him to rehab, I was like "hey, maybe let's give him time to learn his lessons on his own, and with our guidance, and spending more time together as a family, everything will work out for the best." And when I later realized that we were in way over our head and he needed therapy, she wanted to hold off. My instinct is that he wouldn't have been receptive to it. It's difficult, because I've tried to be a nurturing parent, my wife is a smothering one, and he might have benefitted from someone who was more hard-nosed and disciplinarian.

The thing is, his relationship to weed and to life in general is so much different than mine when I was a teenager that I don't think we would have ever been able to relate on a meaningful level about it.

He can be a sweet guy sometimes, but we don't really get along in a friendly way (most days the only thing we have to say to each other is "good morning"), and he doesn't take advice well at all, so I pick my battles. I'm just trying to work up to a conversation about him returning to school later this year or something like that.

I have no good (proven, workable) advice about what to do with a 14-year-old in your situation, unfortunately. With my daughter in middle school though, I've had one talk with her about drugs and alcohol and plan to have many more. And she's seen some of the worst of what we've had to go through with her brother, so maybe that will be a good lesson for her.

Sorry, this is like verbal diarrhea. Oh well.

^ xp so don't let your pets smoke weed, I guess?

My children are 11 and 15 and have not (so far as we know) been curious, but we know that won't last forever. My wife and I don't like smoking or vaping, but we sometimes have edibles (mostly baked goods but some gummies as well). These are kept secure and separate.

If the elder one evidences any curiosity (to us), we will be honest and Have The Talk, but it hasn't come up yet. At 15 I was pretty enthusiastically into booze and drugs, so I can't exactly claim the moral high ground, but I do want them to be safe.

At some point - 18? 21? I dunno - we may go ahead and initiate the conversation ourselves. But for now I think it's okay to wait.

Not at all. That sounds difficult. Thank you for telling about it. I didn’t really have anything to go on so the more stories I hear the better.

xpost

One thing I've been thinking about is how much - as an adult - I have romanticized and idealized my teenage drug experiences. My core group of friends were a bunch of corduroy-clad hippies would smoke bowls in the woods and get peaceful with some music, and so that's what I was looking back on when I was first grappling with my kid's drug use. But in reality, I crossed paths with all kinds of different stoners - including a lot of party-til-you-puke types. So while I was anticipating that if my kid ended up doing drugs in high school, he would be sitting around listening to Pink Floyd records and perusing books of art, he ended up being part of a crew that was doing bong rips and Fireball and watching Rick and Morty and then tasing themselves for Snapchat fame.

Not to be all like "oh these millennials." Just be careful in over-applying your own experiences to your child's life. It's important to look at it holistically. Do you know his friends and their parents? Are they solid people? How thoughtful/impulsive is he? What are his other likes and interests? Do you have a decent relationship with him so far? I'm not asking you to type answers to those questions. Just things to think about.

I reckon if you sit your teenager down with a badly rolled joint and a scratched up copy of Wish You Were Here and said "cancel your evening plans" that just may be enough to put them off it forever

lol

Yeah I think I will just show them that one Rusted Root video

When i was a teenager I loved doing drugs, but I hated parties. Which was a problem, because in those days, the social expectation was to do drugs at parties. Getting high at home alone was seen as weird.

Then as now, when I am high I want to be under my own blankets, surrounded by my own books and food and art supplies and musical instruments. I don't want to be in some stranger's cold apartment, watching idiots drink Milwaukee's best from red plastic cups and shouting over a Hoobastank CD.

*belch* dude, i'm right here

I'm pretty sure most kids--at least kids over the age of 12 or 13--know if their parents smoke weed.

Smoke, yes. Hard to hide in a small house. I am not sure mine are able to detect a half a Delta-8 gummy consumed after they go to bed, but I am prepared for that to change.

I keep my gear on the top shelf of the closet wrapped in 23 nested ziplocks no one knows

probably just a buncha old pine cones in there

In high school, I regularly pilfered by stepfather's weed.

tracer your kid sounds cool

i don't have kids and i don't think i ever will so feel free to ignore me i'm mostly posting out of procrastination. i do feel like in a nature vs nurture sense dependency/addiction issues w/ substances lean far towards the nature end. i grew up in a fairly liberal and middle to upper middle class area where kids drank and smoked weed but we were all far removed from communities that have system addiction issues & what not. (tho this was essentially pre-opioid crisis). i feel like the kids i knew growing up who had really strict parents -- grounded for months for getting drunk once, made to go to "rehab" for smoking weed once etc -- ended up spinning out at some point in college and often getting into harder drugs, missing classes, dropping out, transferring home, or otherwise just charting a course in life that deviated far from the vision the parents thought they were adhering to when they dropped the hammer for basic high school substance experimentation. even the heaviest of hands aren't guaranteed to lead a kid to a certain place in life. by the same token, i did know of kids who were coddled by their parents (in general but also w/ partying) who also ended up on wayward paths as adults.

my mom and i had a sort of wink-wink understanding about partying when i was in high school... if i told her i was sleeping over at a friend's house, that was essentially code for "we will be drinking." she made me promise i would stay wherever i was and wouldn't drive drunk, which i adhered to, tho i did drive stoned all the time at that age which i wouldn't (and don't) do now. i drank to excess plenty of times in high school, vomiting profusely, crazy hungover, even w/ knowledge of my parents & i've never really had a different relationship w/ alcohol than i did at that point, which was "this is fun but also i don't really like it." she asked me once when i was 17 or 18 if i had ever done drugs harder than weed, and i truthfully said no, and she was like, ok cool that's the right answer. i smoked weed a lot in high school then not at all in college then a ton as an adult where my relationship with it became more complicated to the point that i would currently describe my relationship w/ it as... a struggle w/ a fluctuating degree of severity.

i think what i would say to a child about weed is that it's cool for certain things -- listening to music, watching a funny movie, eating potato chips -- but that at a certain point it can impede your desire or ability to complete tasks, achieve goals, socialize etc. of course, for some ppl it has the opposite effect (sparking creativity, loosening up in social situations) but it's prob good for a kid to understand that at some point it can shift from being benign at worst to... something else. (in some sense, frank ocean's mom was right.) i think ultimately there are obvious boundaries a parent could attempt to set (no smoking weed in the house, don't go to school high, no driving etc) but he's going to do what he wants to do (roll joints w/ book pages) and the best you can hope for is that he figures out what a healthy relationship w/ the substance looks like for him. there are of course ppl who get high a few times (or a bunch of times) before admitting that it's not really for them. but i feel like that comes later in life.

i think also making it clear that you can be called upon in a time of drunken or stoned peril and will come to the rescue w/ no judgement & then following thru on that (w/in reason) in a genuine way when something like that occurs can build a level of trust that deters rebellion. even a simple "looks like you had a rough one last night! haha" reaction to an obvious hangover is an implicit way of saying "i'm gonna treat you like an adult but i expect you to act like one as well" ... it's not like i always followed my mom's rules to a T but when it came to drinking i did feel like i had a certain responsibility to hold up my end of the bargain when it came to being given a pass to drink when i was 16-18.

Talk to your kids about potato chips. You don't want them to get that knowledge from their peers.

I found a Pizza Pringles can in my sons room...thank god he was only storing his marijuana in that thing.

yeah I agree with the idea that addiction goes more towards the nature end, a lot of my friends and I grew up in similar environments and we all drank, smoked weed, and would sometimes try things that were harder. some people really had a problem with it and some didn't. I guess I'm lucky I don't have that gene. I had a friend who overdosed and several of my friends were really shaken up saying "this could've been me"

good post, J0rdan.

my kids are 8 & 5 so I am thinking I probably have a while before I have to think about this. but I know it's probably gonna be sooner than I think. I think I was in 5th grade when I first went to a place where people were drinking. mostly "older kids" who were probably like 14 or 15. I didn't have the guts to try it but I did have a wine cooler in 7th grade lol. in retrospect I'm kinda glad White Claws didn't exist back then. I imagine that's responsible for a lot of underage drinking - we all had our Busch Lites and Milwaukee's Best (my first reaction: "damn, this is the best you have?") but they tasted so shitty nobody really made a habit of it.

as for weed I would probably prefer my kids get into that rather than alcohol. feel like teenagers do way more dumb shit when drunk, I sure as hell did, while my high times were mostly watching The Simpsons and weird music videos. fwiw they may have a taste for it already, my dumb ass hotboxed the house making tea for the first time not realizing what would happen if I left the lid off.

tracer, i agree with a lot of what people have said here & would like to add it's potentially a good way to conversationally segue into talking about consent & substances (i realize it's a landmine but it's also urgently needed imho)

Nah I don’t think so. I don’t want to influence whatever journey they take. I don’t think it’s helpful.

I didn't tell them while they were kids but at some point when I was answering their questions about drugs they probably drew their own conclusions

"Son, you should avoid skank weed. And roll your doobs tight but not too tight. Change your bongwater when it get opaque. Or so I have heard, from druggies."

Do you tell your kids you drink alcohol? In states where cannabis is legal I feel it shouldn't have the same kind of stigmas it does elsewhere. If you already reveal you're willing to alter your mental state with chemicals (alcohol) it shouldn't be a stretch to explain marijuana.

That said - cannabis does affect brain development (like underage drinking) so there's many great reasons to explain why abstention is important until a certain age.