Kids, Parents and Drugs

What do you do if your child asks you a direct question like “have you ever used drugs?” and your truthful answer is “yes”? Pediatrician Dr. Perri Klass recently addressed this issue. Honesty is important for our children even if we still want to prevent them from taking their own risks. As a pediatric resident, Klass was asked this question herself so knows it is likely to arise. One way of dealing with this is that we know much more about substance abuse now than we did then. So we can explain that we had no way of knowing what the damage would be back then. Things are different now, for our children. For example, today, scientists understand way more about the neurobiology of the brain of a teenager and the impact of drug and alcohol abuse this has on it. We now know that it is not until 20 that the brain ceases development so such experiments at 16 for example, could be extremely detrimental. The best way to stay healthy is to maintain health through preventive measures. In addition, one never knows what they are going to be negatively affected by before trying it so the education we should be giving to our children is that the risk is just too high.