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August
Alcohol & Drugs
During the past year, I've asked a number of
adolescent boys, Daniel among them, about their
first exposure to alcohol and the pattern of
drinking that developed in their lives. After
returning from a seventh-grade class trip, Daniel
got his older brother to drive him and six of his
friends—four boys and two girls—from the
school in suburban Boston to the family's vacation
home on Cape Cod. Everyone settled into the guest
house. One of the boys suggested they all try
drinking. The others all said it wasn't a "cool"
thing to do, but soon they were bored and started
to express curiosity about what drinking was like.
One of the boys found some Scotch whisky in a
cupboard. Everyone sampled it. Daniel took a couple
of sips and told everyone he thought it tasted
disgusting. Only one boy drank enough to be really
drunk. Others drank small amounts and pretended to
be drunk.
When Daniel was a junior in high school, his
parents left him alone for a weekend for the first
time. He immediately threw a party, which got out
of hand. A wall was damaged, cigarettes were
stubbed out on hardwood floors, and an outdoor deck
was wrecked. Local police broke up the party.
Daniel doesn't regret having the party even though
his parents were furious. He was drunk at his own
party: "I had to be. Otherwise I would have flipped
out." In late adolescence, Daniel drinks about
three times a month, and when he does, he drinks
enough to affect his judgment.
Many of the stories I listened to were
consistent with Daniel's account. From the very
beginning, boys were primarily curious about the
experience of being "under the influence," and they
pursued this goal even when they found their first
tastes of alcoholic beverages repellent. There is
enough peer reputation involved that boys will
sometimes pretend to be intoxicated when they
aren't; or at least their friends suspect they are
faking intoxication.
Even when boys postpone their first drinking
experiences to later adolescence, they may harbor
the same curiosity as younger boys to put
themselves under the influence. Ross drank for the
first time a few days after graduating from high
school. He had been a member of the Student
Awareness Program at his high school, which meant
that he voluntarily abstained from using alcohol
and drugs, and led discussions among middle school
students about the hazards of substance use and
abuse.
Once he had graduated, Ross wanted to discover
what drinking was like before he went to college.
He planned to do it at a friend's house where, for
safety's sake, he could stay the night. Of the
several age-mates at the friend's house, only three
were drinking. Ross enjoyed himself. He was acting
silly, and one of his friends followed him around
writing down all the funny things he said, which
annoyed him at the time but now he's glad to have
the record. Two years later, he drinks about once a
week; about once a month he drinks enough to affect
his thinking.
John Donovan, a psychologist at the University
of Pittsburgh who studies teen drinking, believes
that peer influence is exaggerated as the cause of
underage drinking. The main causes, he believes,
are the general cultural acceptance of drinking,
the observations a boy makes of drinking in his
immediate environment beginning in early childhood,
and the way drinking is addressed or ignored in
family discussions as a boy is growing up.
In my conversations with boys, however, I found
that peer influence appeared to be a strong
contributing factor in most boys' introduction to
drinking.
Certainly most of their drinking occurred in the
company of peers, not adults. Students at Morgan's
middle school were allowed to go home for lunch.
One day in seventh grade, he and a few of his best
friends all went to another boy's home for lunch.
There were no adults present. They all poured
themselves glasses of Manischevitz (sweet kosher
wine). Most of the boys didn't finish their wine,
but one of them finished his own and the remains in
others' glasses. When the boys returned to school,
the friend who had consumed the most acted drunk.
Morgan believes he had taken enough to affect his
behavior but that he was exaggerating his
condition.
Some adolescents merely provide their peers with
opportunities to drink, but others exert social
pressure. When Ben was fourteen years old, he
visited his older brother at college. His brother
and some of his brother's friends decided it was
their "duty" to get Ben drunk, and they did. Ben
remembers thinking it was cool, but not at all his
own idea. In late adolescence, he drinks moderately
about twice a month, and enough to get drunk about
twice a year.
The Well-lubricated Society
Most boys have been observing social drinking
since early childhood. Susan Cheever gave one
child's account of family cocktail hours in her
memoir, Note Found in a Bottle; My Life as a
Drinker: "I loved the paraphernalia of drinking,
the slippery ice trays that I was allowed to refill
and the pungent olives, which were my first
childhood treat, and I loved the way adults got
loose and happy and forgot that I was just a
child."
Two-thirds of adults in the United States
consume alcoholic beverages, many of them foully
occasionally, and a majority of them without
causing known significant harm to themselves or
others. Two-thirds doesn't mean everyone, but it is
a substantial enough percentage to say that, among
adults, drinking alcohol at least occasionally is
normal rather than exceptional.
Many adult parties, ceremonial occasions, and
business lunches are events where alcoholic
beverages are served. In many families, the adults
drink before dinner—and in some households
before lunch also—and perhaps consume wine
with their meals as well. The ubiquity of drinking
is expressed in such folk humor as "Wherever four
Episcopalians are gathered, there is sure to be a
fifth." Adult consumption of alcohol is so common
that people employ the words "drinking" or "drinks"
to refer to alcoholic beverages; a group of
beverages that might be consumed in place of
alcohol have to be distinguished by adding the
qualifier "soft."
Adult drinking in public is legal just about
everywhere in the United States, although the sale
and serving of alcohol is prohibited at certain
times and places, and is subject to licensing and
government regulation. If adults injure others
while acting with impaired judgment or self-control
from drinking alcohol, they may be held
accountable, criminally or civilly or both, for the
harm done. In some jurisdictions, adults can be
prosecuted if they allow minors to drink in their
homes or give them alcohol elsewhere; they are more
liable to be prosecuted if the minors then injure
themselves or others.
In addition to individual adults who abstain
from drinking alcoholic beverages, there are large
groups such as Mormons and Moslems who oppose on
religious grounds the use of alcohol and other
stimulants or depressants. Boys do have
opportunities to see that drinking is optional,
that it isn't practiced universally by adults.
Unlike the consumption of drugs such as marijuana,
cocaine, or heroin, which is illegal for everyone,
adult and child alike, the consumption of alcohol
is basically legal for adults across the country,
and illegal in public places for everyone before
their twenty-first birthdays. Many studies confirm,
however, that a large proportion of adolescents,
especially boys, have consumed alcohol long before
they reach majority age.
According to a 1997 survey by the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, between 8
and 9 percent of eighth graders had drunk alcohol
within the past thirty days. There were about 9.5
million current drinkers between the ages of twelve
and twenty, 4.5 million of whom could be classified
as binge drinkers, and almost 2 million of whom
were heavy drinkers—to all intents and
purposes minors who are alcoholics. All of these
statistics are extremely sobering, but I pay
special attention to the binge drinkers. Some of
the juvenile alcoholics have probably learned to
function adequately even with a high level of
consumption. But the binge drinkers are the ones
who drink to such excess at parties or on other
occasions that they often threaten themselves with
alcohol poisoning, assault people, destroy
property, and jeopardize the lives of others when
they drive.
Seventy-five percent of twelfth graders in the
Health and Human Services survey had drunk alcohol
within the past year. Only a little more than 40
percent of all twelfth graders thought there was
any great risk involved in heavy drinking. One
study I consulted put the median age at which boys
begin to drink at slightly over thirteen years;
another study put the average age of first drink at
twelve.
A 1995 Minnesota Department of Health survey
showed that nearly a third of high school seniors
statewide drank to a state of intoxication at least
monthly, or had more than five drinks on a typical
drinking occasion. A majority of boys surely think
of drinking alcohol as something they are
eventually going to do—like driving a car or
having sex. The question is not so much whether as
when, where, and what type of alcoholic beverage.
Once they begin drinking, many adolescents
participate in binge drinking, and some progress
into alcohol addiction.
In the town where I live, there are eight
schools that each combine the first eight grades.
Graduates of all these schools converge on one high
school campus for ninth grade. The town and school
cooperate in providing full-time alcohol and drug
counselors for the high school, an implicit
admission that teenage drinking and drug use are
serious and frequent problems. (Studies I've
consulted indicate that a substantial number of
students nationwide find ways to bring alcohol to
school and consume it on school property.)
One counselor at our high school told me that
over 90 percent of the students drink. It's a main
way, she said, that kids overcome their discomfort
in adjusting to this big, new, strange place.
Drinking cuts through every clique and every status
group. By the year-end holiday of their freshman
year, many are falling apart. By the end of
sophomore year, she judged, many have gotten a grip
on their patterns of drinking, but I didn't find
much reassurance in her estimate of the statistics.
Obviously the high school doesn't invite or want
the situation; it comes unbidden.
The lesser mass of a boy means that a given
amount of alcohol will affect him faster and harder
than it will affect most adults. As a story I
picked up on the Internet made clear, even boys who
are familiar with this general relationship between
body mass and intoxication don't know how to apply
it in actual situations:
About a month ago, I had a rather difficult
experience. I am a freshman in high school and had
made plans with two girls in my class to go
drinking with a few junior and senior boys. So I
had planned, me and my 100 pounds, to have a
drinking contest (shots of gin) with a 200 pound
junior. I had drunk a few times, and I liked the
way it made me feel. I thought it was fun! The boy
I was to have a contest with had already smoked up
a little. I knew he was gonna win. I had about
three or four shots mixed with pink lemonade—I
can't stand the taste straight—and I blacked
out.
I don't remember what happened next, but I was
informed. The girls asked them to stop but the boys
kept giving me more to drink. After I had about
eight or nine shots I started throwing up. It was
pretty bad after that. A friend called my parents
who called 911, and I was rushed to the hospital in
an ambulance. It was definitely the worst
experience of my life. You may know how I feel and
you may not, but it is really awful when your
parents have no trust in you, and follow you around
the house to make sure you aren't sneaking a quick
drink or smoking up in a bathroom, especially since
I only smoked up once, and they know only once. I
will never have my same life back, and I will never
have the freedom I once had!!
Motives
Adult motives for drinking include: easing
discomfort or unease in social
situations—drinking as icebreaking; providing
solace for loneliness or boredom; inducing
relaxation or relief from stress—drinking
after work, for example; soothing the pain of
episodic or chronic unhappiness at work or in
family life or other relationships; allaying
anxiety about sexual performance; enjoying the
sensation or "buzz" a drinker may get from light to
moderate drinking; satisfying the body's biological
craving for a substance the person is addicted to;
appreciating the acquired taste of the beverage
itself—a distinctive beer or a prized wine;
causing a feeling of release from inhibitions
through getting "high"; and neutralizing
inhibitions against aggressiveness and other
antisocial behavior.
The conventional view is that men get drunk, and
then when they are drunk and "don't know what they
are doing," they become violent. My jazz colleague,
Tony Pringle, told me once of a regular Saturday
night gig he played at an English pub where it was
expected the evening would end in a brawl. The
evening-ending fight was so routine that the band
played the same song, "Don't Go Way Nobody;' when
it broke out.
For some males, I believe there is a degree of
intentionality involved in drinking and then
provoking a fight, or in drinking and then
initiating aggressive, uninvited sex. The drinking
is counted on in advance to neutralize any
inhibitions and then to provide an excuse: I didn't
know what I was doing. Alcohol is very intimately
associated statistically with criminal activity. It
can function to allay the criminal's anxiety
beforehand and to deliberately override his
superego or conscience; it may be associated with
his being excessively aggressive during the crime;
and then afterward used as an excuse.
Curiosity about the experience of being high or
drunk may motivate a boy's first consumption of
alcohol, but even in adolescence boys may drink for
any of the reasons adults manifest. Artemis, a
college student, recalls that during the three
months she dated Brian in their senior year in high
school, he would sometimes be drunk but hide it so
well that she couldn't tell for sure. "Brian is
very shy, and he came to rely on alcohol as a means
to overcome his shyness. I found out after we broke
up that Brian wouldn't even call me for the first
month we were going together without drinking
first." Despite the history of alcoholism in his
family, Brian could not be deterred in his drinking
habits—or maybe because of the family history.
He regarded himself as "stone cold sober" after
drinking four beers, and would tell Artemis
casually that he'd done a few shots of whisky by
himself to prepare for later partying.
As males sometimes drink in order to fortify
their nerve to pursue the sex they desire, so they
may encounter girls who drink in order to override
the reservations they feel about having sex. As
Caroline Knapp wrote in her memoir, Drinking: A
Love Story, "The first time Meg had sex, her best
friend advised her: 'Just get drunk. It'll be
easy.' So that's exactly what she did. She got
drunk then, and she got drunk the next time and the
time after that, and after a while the idea of
having sex with a man without getting drunk first
seemed pretty much impossible."
Drinking to alleviate loneliness or boredom is a
well-known adult theme, but one should not discount
its significance among adolescents. As one
sixteen-year-old boy put it, "I don't do drugs, but
a lot of my friends do. I do drink on occasion,
but, hey, nobody is perfect. Parents tend to blame
the media for these problems, but seeing a couple
of cute frogs reading a Budweiser billboard is not
going to make me want to drink. Boredom will,
though. The main reason why we do these things is
because we have nothing better to do. Movies and
arcades are fairly expensive. Going to the mall
isn't all that much fun because the security guards
follow us around like we had trouble written on our
foreheads. So what do we do? We go to a friend's
house and drink or get high just to pass the time.
Do discipline us when we get caught, but as a
preventative, give us something to do."
To the list of motives for drinking that adults
and adolescents may share, I would add a few others
that are more characteristic of adolescents (or
even preadolescents) than of adults. Drinking can
be an act of rebellion by kids. They know it is a
hot button to push. But just as some may wish to
flaunt their drinking, many others, knowing what a
hot button it is for adults, do their best to hide
their drinking. Leif first drank beer in seventh
grade at the home of a classmate whose
Italian-American parents were accustomed to having
children drink alcohol—mainly wine—in
small quantities. The parents weren't home. His
friend's older brother bought beer for a few boys.
Leif drank enough to get sick. His friends tried to
take care of him quietly so that his parents
wouldn't learn of it; but they were unsuccessful.
Leif endured a prolonged grounding.
Another motive of youthful drinking is to adopt
a badge of faux maturity. Many boys like to pretend
they are older than they are. Drinking for some is
a pretend-to-be-adult activity.
More than is true of adults, I believe, boys
also drink as deliberate risktaking. They know that
it is risky, although many feel that they are
magically immune from the downside of risks. They
have seen adults drink and drive without
accidents—why can't they?
Drugs
"It was the summer after my freshman year in
high school," Gary, now a freshman at Northwestern,
said to me. "I had just finished adjusting to that
hellish transition that comes with any major change
in life. I was beginning to get into a new rhythm
of living. I felt socially comfortable, reasonably
confident in my maturity and decisionmaking
ability. Until that summer, I had been completely
against any form of substance abuse, from drugs to
alcohol to cigarettes. Most of my friends were two
or three years older than I, and well used to
partying. I had grown quite used to hanging out
with my friends when they got drunk and high. Many
times I had an invitation to partake, always I
refused.
"That certain summer evening felt different. I
was feeling bold, rebellious, curious. I was
beginning to get fed up with the 'just say no'
propaganda. I felt no need to 'fit in.' I had spent
all year trying to do that in other ways. I was not
being pushed by my friends. I had had numerous
conversations and debates relating to drug use, and
they all knew my position well. I was
simply...curious. I wanted to branch out, try
something new. It was a matter of exploring my
world, not an instance of another world invading
mine.
"Three friends and I piled into a van and drove
to see the Allman Brothers. It was my first
big-arena concert without adult supervision. I felt
giddy and free. I had never seen anything like this
before. Bikers and burnt-out hippies were there in
abundance, but so were kids our age. New people,
new clothing, new music, new style, new culture,
new drugs. . . new everything! The whole atmosphere
seemed to shout HAPPINESS! Let yourself go!
"The concert was a blast. We set up our blankets
on the lawn overlooking the stage. I had already
made up my mind—I was going to smoke pot. The
sun began to set, the light grew dim, and the music
started. The driver packed some nugs into his bowl,
passed it around, and I inhaled...
"I didn't get high the first time, or the second
or third. It took a while. I loved it. Every time
after that, I smoked because I was with close
friends and wanted to share an experience with
them. Only once did I find myself developing a
habit. I noticed the trend and stopped it. I tried
alcohol and cigarettes as well, and as of now use
the three occasionally. I am addicted to nothing
except coffee, nor have I ever used marijuana to
the point of addiction. For me, drug use is not the
fiendish addiction of junkies, nor the mindless
wasting of so many of my classmates. It is an
occasional pleasure to be enjoyed among friends,
and remains a subtle, yet exciting, part of my
social life."
Gary's story reminds me that just as parental
permission to spend the night after the prom at a
hotel is an implicit permission to drink or use
drugs and have sex, so parental permission to
attend many popular music concerts in big arenas
without chaperones is implicit permission to drink
and use drugs.
The statistics on drug use by adolescents in the
United States are as troubling as those on
alcohol—both in terms of use and in perception
of risk. From the 1997 Department of Health and
Human Services survey: Fifty-four percent of
twelfth graders have used illicit drugs at least
once. The same is true of 47 percent of tenth
graders, and a fraction less than 30 percent of
eighth graders. Marijuana is the most widely used
illicit drug in the United States and tends to be
the first used by children and teenagers. Almost 6
percent of twelfth graders use marijuana daily.
Slightly over 1 percent of eighth graders use it
daily. Only 25 percent of eighth graders think
there is any great risk involved in trying
marijuana.
One of the drug counselors at our local high
school says that, as with alcohol, over 90 percent
of the students have tried marijuana. Its use is
not by any means confined to kids doing poorly
academically; many "top-of-the-line" kids come to
her for consultation, she says. A large number
consume alcohol and drugs on school premises, and
many of them prefer marijuana to alcohol because
it's easier to conceal.
Children and adolescents who do not like the
taste of alcoholic beverages but want the
experience of being under the influence can alter
the taste with mixers, and some companies have
facilitated matters by selling sweet-tasting
coolers with plenty of alcohol in large containers.
Smoking marijuana can't be sweetened up, but kids
will persist through unpleasant first experiences,
if Grant's story from tenth grade is
representative: "I really wanted the experience. We
all sat in a circle and I saw my first bong. I was
intrigued and nervous—didn't want to betray my
inexperience. I watched carefully, trying to work
out the method. When the bong got to me, I did
manage to take a hit, although my form was not
good. I think I smoked out of it two or three more
times. I remember getting lightheaded in a very
pleasant way. The world around me looked more
vibrant. I had perma-grin. Somehow we ended up
watching MTV. I lay on a couch and found out what
happens when you smoke too much. I got clammy and
nauseous. 'Give It Away' by the Red Hot Chili
Peppers was on the TV. The sick feeling finally
passed, but it was not pleasant. This experience
did not turn me off the drug, though. It acted as a
cautionary measure, showing me the cost of abuse as
well as the pleasures of responsible use."
A majority of those who try marijuana do not go
on to sample other drugs. But over 12 percent of
eighth graders and 17 percent of tenth graders have
tried stimulants such as amphetamines and
methamphetamines at least once. Between 8 and 9
percent of twelfth graders have tried cocaine at
least once.
Smoking cigarettes shouldn't be left out of a
summary of addictive drugs. The side effects of
cigarettes on concentration, memory, alertness, and
ability to perform complex tasks may not be as
great as with other drugs, but the longer range
health risks are considerable. Nine percent of
eighth graders smoke daily: 3.5 percent smoke a
half-pack or more. By twelfth grade, the percent of
daily smokers has climbed to 25: over 36 percent
have smoked within the past thirty days. Of the 62
million Americans who smoke, over 4 million are
kids aged twelve to seventeen.
Rules and Models
In Chapter 6 I told about a fellow pediatrician
here in Boston, Nicholas Kriek, who grew up in
South Africa—how his father told him at age
twelve, after he had been involved in an incident
of neighborhood vandalism, that he had to be
accountable for his actions if he broke the law;
his father was not going to rescue him. Nick
remembers being surprised by that; he had thought
of parents as people who came to your rescue no
matter what. His own parents, Nick felt, were in
many ways not particularly good models for him when
he became a parent himself. But he remembers their
emphasis, as poorly educated immigrants to South
Africa, on his education. "They regarded the school
system and teachers as being larger than life in
character. I had the view as a kid that teachers
were important and serious, an authority to be
respected."
The time came when Nicholas Kriek's oldest son,
Tommy, collaborated in some vandalism at the middle
school, and Nick found himself sitting in the
principal's office. She said the police would have
to be notified. "If it's a police matter, then go
to the police," Nick agreed. "Maybe he will learn a
lesson." On the day of Tommy's court appearance, to
his son's surprise, Nick did not accompany him
because he had a long-standing engagement to
present a paper in Washington, nor did he send a
lawyer as some parents did. His son was learning
something about accountability. But there were
trying days to come for Tommy's parents.
"When Tommy went to high school, he got terribly
involved in drugs and his schoolwork suffered. He
had a terribly rebellious adolescence. He was never
a problem at home. There, he was helpful and
good-natured, but covertly defiant When he was
outside the house, he did his own thing. Neither my
wife nor I grew up around drugs. In South Africa,
getting caught using drugs was a felony offense. So
I can tell you honestly that throughout that period
we were bewildered and dazed. We asked ourselves
over and over again, 'What did we do wrong, what
are we doing wrong?' We were naive. Today, if there
were an unexplained deterioration in a son's school
performance, I would think first of all to look for
drugs or alcohol, or both.
"Somehow among our circle of friends, one of the
mothers discovered that our kids were doing a lot
of marijuana and drinking as well. A meeting of
several kids and their parents was called, and this
horrific scene was laid out for us. The kids
acknowledged what they were doing. The plan was to
see if, as a parental group, we could help all of
them. We met with a psychiatrist a few times. There
was improvement, but Tommy did not stop using
drugs.
"Approaching his senior year, Tommy got very
interested in art and decided he wanted to go to
art school in Maryland after graduation. No sooner
had he arrived in Maryland than it was obvious he
wasn't certain he'd made a good choice. He was
quite depressed. I remember talking to him many
times because I was quite concerned he might
attempt suicide. In his first year there, he
developed a burst appendix that caused
life-threatening peritonitis. I got a call from a
Baltimore emergency room asking permission to do
surgery.
"The surgeon was marvelous. It turned out that
his own son, an expert skier, had died in an
avalanche. We had frank discussions of the
challenges of raising our sons. When Tommy was
better, the surgeon took him to a ball game. I know
that my son admired him immensely as a human being,
as a model. Tommy dropped out of art school after
that year, worked as a waiter, moved in with some
friends in Boston, and got very depressed again.
But when he recovered his equilibrium, he decided
to go to college. He had a very shaky first
semester because he had lousy study habits. Then he
just got stronger and stronger, graduated summa cum
laude in three years, got a scholarship to Stanford
and became a serious citizen. Now, with his new
Ph.D., he's ready to teach philosophy.
"My boys—I think if you were to ask them
about their dad, they would describe me as a
moralist, as too moralistic. I have found thinking
about morality essential to finding my own path in
life—where to go, how to behave. Without it,
I'm lost. If I've given my kids anything of value,
it's that I've tried to set an example in my own
behavior. You can't tell them one thing and do
something different yourself. I know parents who
make that mistake. If you want your kids to behave
in a certain way, then behave that way yourself and
there is a chance that they will think well of you
and follow in that path."
Parents faced with sons in trouble over poor
behavior or for drinking or taking drugs can veer
to extremes. Some parents wish to dissociate
themselves from misbehaving sons; they abandon them
to their own devices, which is a very different
thing from holding them accountable for what they
have done but supporting them nonetheless. Other
parents rush indiscriminately to their sons'
defense in full confidence that there's no
misbehavior for which a person can't escape the
consequences if he has a good enough lawyer or an
aggressive enough parent.
Recently I heard of a fourteen-year-old boy who
was expelled from a private school for misconduct
involving drugs. When he applied for admission to
another private school, the school contacted his
former school for academic records and comments on
his overall performance. The old school forwarded
the grades but refused to comment further; the
boy's parents had threatened to sue the school if
administrators divulged to anyone the cause of the
boy's expulsion, or even that he had been expelled.
It isn't hard to guess what a boy might infer from
this: He can count on parental help to avoid the
consequences of any delinquent behavior.
Many parents who face one or another of such
behavioral crises will feel just as surprised,
shocked even, as the Krieks felt. Unless parents
remind themselves to look carefully into the
culture their children are living in, they may
blithely coast along assuming their children's
adolescence will be very much like their own as
remembered from twenty or more years
earlier—until evidence surfaces that their
children's lives are very different from what
parents expected.
In the face of unexpected behavior by his sons,
Nick Kriek did a number of things in exemplary
fashion. He honored the laws and institutional
rules about such things as vandalism, drinking, and
drugs that circumscribed the boys' lives, making
clear to them that they were accountable for their
behavior if they were caught violating the rules.
He didn't take the fence-straddling position that
the laws and rules are ill-advised or too strict,
therefore the issue is not whether one heeds the
rules but whether one gets caught.
I mentioned to him the episode I describe in
Chapter 18 of several high school seniors in our
town who were caught with alcohol at the prom and
excluded, as promised, from graduation ceremonies
with their classmates. "I would like to think,"
said Nick, "that if my kid was one of those who
transgressed knowing what the rules were, that we
would be upset that something the whole family was
looking forward to had been ruined, but we would
say that the rules were known to everyone and the
consequences have to be accepted."
With respect to drinking alcoholic beverages,
there are different rules for adults than for
minors. The reason for the variation in rules needs
to be explained to kids—and can be explained
in terms of the relative maturity needed to handle
the effects of alcohol on the body and behavior,
and the threat of addiction. But if kids observe
their parents drinking to the point of intoxication
or serving other adults enough alcohol that they
become intoxicated, the moral authority of the
adults, on this issue at least, is pretty badly
compromised. Parents don't have to practice
abstinence from alcohol to be effective models, but
they do have to practice sobriety; and if they fall
below that standard, to their children's knowledge,
they should take the initiative in acknowledging
their slip and its consequences for their being a
good model.
Forewarned and Well-prepared
When I talked with the Melvins, I learned about
another family that prizes clarity about rules.
"Our boys (Ben and Ed are aged twelve and ten) know
that we have expectations for their behavior,"
Patricia said. "We're not shy about letting them
know. Many kids in this community are not really
sure what their parents expect. Parents don't think
they can put their foot down and say, 'I expect you
not to drink alcohol on Saturday night.'" "We all
make mistakes," George Melvin interjected. "I've
told our kids on numerous occasions that they are
going to make mistakes, and they have to be willing
to admit to them. That's a crucial part of
development."
George's viewpoint about both accountability and
slips has a poignant background. His father died of
alcoholism and was abusive when drunk toward
George's mother and the children. George is a
recovering alcoholic himself. Ben and Ed know the
family history. "They know that my father, their
grandfather, was not able to live a full life, not
able to show that he loved people, not able to hold
down a good job. I grew up with it as 'the big
secret.' You really pay a big price for not talking
about it." "Years ago," Patricia volunteered, "Ben
said to me, 'Do you think I'm going to be like you,
Mommy, and drink alcohol, or do you think I'll be
like Daddy and have a problem with alcohol?' And I
said, 'That's something we don't know. We do know
that when a mom or a dad is an alcoholic, there is
a greater chance that their child might have a
problem.' Our kids know that they are at greater
risk.
"George made a deliberate decision to be the man
his father was not:' Patricia remarked. "That was
hard fought and hard won:' "The kids are aware that
we've made choices that our parents didn't make:'
George added. "I'm trying to say to them that you
have to make choices. To us, the kids are top
priority—teaching them that it's not about
having a fancy car but about taking time to be with
your family. That's basic stuff."
Patricia Melvin, who is a high school alcohol
and drug counselor, pointed out the connections
between alcohol and sexual experience among
adolescents. "One of the things I do is teach a
sexuality and health class at the high school.
There was community support for it, and also
community fanaticism about some of the topics we
discuss. We let all the kids know that many kids
have been drinking when they have their first
sexual experience. We talk about how the sex might
have been consensual, but would the person have
made the same choice if he or she had not been
drinking?"
As involved as she is in dealing with issues of
sexuality, drinking, and drugs at the high school,
Patricia Melvin still thinks the parental role is
pivotal. "We can hire as many counselors as we
want, but unless the families are behind us we will
not get very far. We do run programs for parents
through the school system, but often it's
'preaching to the choir.' At a PTA meeting I meet
the parents who do know where their kids are on
Friday and Saturday night—but not the parents
who stopped having a curfew in tenth grade because
the kids didn't like it and there was too much
arguing about it. My greatest concern is that
parents don't have any discussions with their kids
before the problem hits them."
I asked Patricia what she thought about parents
who allow kids to have parties with alcohol in
their homes. "I think they sincerely believe they
are providing a safety net for the kids," she
replied. "They honestly believe they are doing a
service by saying, 'You can come here, the keg is
ready, and we will take the keys so you can't drive
home.' My impression is that it's happening less
than it used to. Many parents think the kids are
going to drink anyhow, so there might as well be
some safety built in. It's the same mindset as
invented the designated driver—which is a way
of saying that if the driver is reasonably sober,
everyone else can get drunk. I agree that
designated drivers are good for safety, but I think
it's a poor overall message."
In her work with adolescents and young adults,
Patricia Melvin emphasizes practical
considerations: "Alcohol and drug issues are health
issues with some fairly dramatic negative
consequences. There are moral consequences, too. On
all health issues I think in terms of the idea of
moderation. Of course I see our society's
ambivalence weaving through the issues of alcohol
and drugs. I think it's very important to spell
everything out—expectations, consequences,
values, attitudes—so kids don't have to figure
everything out for themselves." Her logic appeals
to me. Let the morality flow out of information
about what alcohol and drugs do to body and mind,
and out of known potential consequences of impaired
action and judgment, rather than beginning with a
moral message that alcohol and drugs are bad, so
"just say no." I believe adolescents respond to
accurate information of obvious gravity better than
to scare tactics.
When I asked George and Patricia how they were
preparing their boys, who are on the edge of
adolescence, to deal with its social pressures,
they said they were aware that they were steering
Ben and Ed away from an indiscriminate wish to be
popular. "When I think of the 'cool kids' at even
the elementary or middle school levels," Patricia
says, "I think of kids who care more about what
they look like, who wear designer labels. I think
of a group of kids who will cut other kids to make
themselves bigger. I think Ben is not comfortable
with that kind of behavior. I don't think he wishes
he was in this crowd or that. He has some friends
who are thoughtful, nice kids, and he's happy with
that. He doesn't do a lot of socializing on
weekends. He's not talking about dating yet, but
some of his classmates are. The kids that will be
the partying kids in eighth or tenth grade, who
will drink and smoke pot earlier—these are not
the kids he gravitates toward, nor do they
gravitate toward him. We've talked to the kids
about how they only get to be kids once, and it
should be fun, not high risk or high anxiety. I
think the notion of letting them be kids as long as
they can be is high up on my list of important
things."
Two Families
The Krieks and the Melvins are both deeply
attentive to the lives of their children. All four
of them take with utmost seriousness their
responsibility to model behavior as an intentional
inspiration to their sons. All of them treat laws
and rules about alcohol and drugs with respect and
hold their sons accountable for behavior in
violation of the rules. That said, the two families
have approached adolescent drinking and drugs from
very different backgrounds and mindsets. The Krieks
were not mindful of the extent to which alcohol and
drugs pervade adolescent social groupings, nor did
they have any experience with drinking and drugs
from their own adolescence to bring to bear on
their sons' lives. Their sons were growing up in an
environment in which a very large majority of
students consumed both alcohol and drugs. Before
they knew it, they were in the middle of a crisis
with Tommy. It would have taken very carefully
thought out parental strategies if the Kriek boys
had gotten through high school without falling
under the influence.
The Melvins were not hindered by
naïveté. George knows from three
generations of his family's history how much
devastation addiction to alcohol can wreak.
Patricia deals with the issues professionally every
workday. She is particularly aware that pressure to
use alcohol and drugs can vary considerably
depending on what cliques and crowds a boy belongs
to. In many adolescent groups, consumption of
alcohol and/or drugs is virtually the price of
admission. So the Melvins have family discussions
and recite family history. Though the daughter of a
minister, Patricia tends to her spirituality
privately. It is George who takes the boys to
church. The three males in the family are so
engaged in the life of their congregation that Ben
and Ed say it is their biggest support outside the
immediate family and a further support for
sobriety. With all their concern, however, the
Melvins are not sure what lies ahead for Ben and
Ed. "I remember our having a conversation about a
year ago:' George says to Patricia, "and I think I
was more willing to say it is okay to let our boys
be the odd one out; and you were the one saying,
well, they've got to live with all these kids, so
maybe we need to chill out a little bit. I don't
know what adolescence will be like for them.
Perhaps they will feel that Mom and Dad are a
little too far off target."
The question of how much to monitor adolescents'
activities is a delicate one. I remember when my
daughter was in high school and invited to a party
where, we ascertained, there were not going to be
chaperones and were sure to be alcohol and
marijuana. We told Mary Helen that she couldn't go,
and she was not happy with our decision. But a
couple of days later she said she was glad Carolyn
and I had made the decision we did; she had heard
that the party got very rowdy, and she knew she
would have been uncomfortable. One of the things we
can do for adolescents is stay in close contact
with them, and, in the interest of protecting them,
sometimes make decisions they might hesitate to
make for themselves. They should be aware from
frequent reiteration that we would as parents do
everything possible to rescue them from situations
where they feel endangered or pressured to act
against their best judgment. I know this is a
difficult balancing act, because the parent wants
to be an ally, not a heavy-handed spoilsport. But
the teenager's world is a dangerous place, which
Joy Dryfoos captured in the title of her book, Safe
Passage: Making it Through Adolescence in a Risky
Society.
The best example of where a parent doesn't want
to end up in relation to an adolescent comes from
the boy I quoted earlier: his parents were
following him around the house to make sure he
didn't sneak a drink or smoke pot in the bathroom.
The parent as policeman is not a happy role.
Recently I saw an ad for an in-home drug test kit.
If a parent mails an adolescent's urine and hair
samples to the lab, a report will be issued within
three days on traces of marijuana, cocaine, PCP,
and heroin use-and, on request, no doubt for an
extra charge, LSD and alcohol. "Parents can give
their teen a reason to say no to drugs," the ad
says: "'My parents drug test me.'"
Mind-boggling.
The power of the youth drinking and drug culture
is such that every strategy needs to be employed to
help boys from getting entangled: early and
continuing family discussions; clearly articulated
family norms of respect for rules and laws
regarding mind- and mood-altering substances;
honest accountability for breaking the rules;
parental modeling with respect to abstinence or
moderation in consumption of alcohol and abstinence
from illegal drug use; professional counseling as
suggested by known problems within the family;
monitoring of teens' activities, particularly in
concert with other parents from their groups.
All of these techniques are needed to counter
the capacity of these substances to affect
adolescents' development adversely through
habituation and addiction, through diversion and
distraction from the central process of forming a
personal identity, and by interfering with the
making of good choices, the benchmark of
character.
Yet for all the attention that has to be paid to
the intrinsic and insidious effects of alcohol and
drugs, that is not the main issue. Adolescents,
like adults, drink and drug themselves to treat a
wide variety of vicissitudes: boredom, loneliness,
anger and resentment, anxiety, a sense of
purposelessness, feelings of powerlessness, sexual
frustration, and not having a useful enough role in
society. If we could magically remove alcohol and
drugs from adolescents' lives, those vicissitudes
would scream even louder for attention; and if we
would more forthrightly address these feelings and
the social realities in which they are lodged, we
would remove a fair amount of the incentive to
resort to alcohol and drugs at appallingly young
ages.
J. Donovan and R. Jessor, "Structure of Problem
Behavior in Adolescence and Young Adulthood,"
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 53
(1985),890-904.
S. Cheever, Note Found in a Bottle: My Life As a
Drinker (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).
United States Department of Health and Human
Services, Drug Use Survey Shows Mixed Results for
Nation's Youth. Report of the 23rd annual
Monitoring the Future Survey. Posted on the
Internet December 20,1997, at www.hhs.gov.
Prevention Resource Center, Minnesota Department
of Public Health. Interview of Jean Funk, Project
director, by Julia Jergensen-Edelman, posted on the
Internet by sci@gartland.com (1998).
C. Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story (New York:
Dell, 1996),83.
J. Gans, America's Adolescents: How Healthy Are
They? (Chicago: American Medical Association,
1990).
L. Johnston, J. Bachman, and P. O'Malley,
Monitoring the Future: Questionnaire Responses from
the Nation's High School Seniors, 1993 (Ann Arbor,
Mich.: Institute for Social Research, 1994).
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance-United States,
1995, 45:ss-5.
Dryfoos, Safe Passage
©2007 Eli Newberger
Eli Newberger,
M.D., a leading figure in the movement to improve
the protection and care of children, is renowned
for his ability to bring together good sense and
science on the main issues of family life. A
pediatrician and author of many influential works
on child abuse, he teaches at Harvard Medical
School and founded the Child Protection Team and
the Family Development Program at Children’s
Hospital in Boston. From his research and practice
he has derived a philosophy that focuses on the
strength and resilience of parent-child
relationships, and a practice oriented to
compassion and understanding, rather than blame and
punishment. He is the author of The
Men They Will Become: The Nature and Nurture
of Male Charaacter
and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife
Carolyn, a developmental and clinical child
psychologist." www.elinewberger.com
or E-Mail.
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