Should parents share their past drug abuse with their children?
If you have used drugs in the past and are now a parent, you may wonder whether or not to share your experiences with your children. It may seem that sharing information could be both helpful and hurtful in regard to helping them make choices about drug use. In other words, if you admit to drug use, will they view the information as cautionary and heed your warnings, or will they use it to justify their experimentation with drugs? If parents tell their children they never experimented with drugs, will they lose credibility? Or, if parents disclose details about their drug use will it send the message that, “they survived, so I will too?”
A few recent studies have focused on this issue and have produced some interesting findings. Parenting.com.blog.nytimes reports that a recent study, “by the 60-year-old Hazelden addiction treatment center, headquartered in Center City, Minn., concludes that we should all be talking early and often, and telling the whole truth. Called “Four Generations Overcoming Addiction,” the study says, simply, that our children want to hear these things from us, and that conversation is a powerful weapon against teen drug use. It seems that about half of parent’s have my past and half have my friends’ (specifically 47 percent of parents report misusing drugs and alcohol as teens). All of us need to start talking.
Among the findings (of the Hazelden addiction treatment center study):
Half of teens say it would make them less likely to use drugs if their parents told them about their own drug use when they were younger.
Two-thirds of teens (67 percent) say their parents have already told them about their experiences with alcohol and other drugs when they were young — and these teens almost unanimously (95 percent) said that kind of honesty about drug use is a good thing.
Among the one-third of teenagers (33 percent) who report their parents have not talked with them about their own use of drugs as teenagers, two in three (68 percent) say that they would want their parents to share these past experiences.
Whether parents have told their teens about their use of alcohol does not significantly decrease the teens’ perceptions of their parents as role models. In fact, teens who are aware of their parents’ experiences with alcohol or drugs as teenagers are nearly as likely as those who are not aware to consider their parents to be role models (90 percent vs. 93 percent).”
Further, according to a new study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (cited by interventionservices.com), telling your children about your past drug use may lead them to view drug abuse in a less serious light. The study showed that children who had talked about drugs and alcohol with their parents had less interest in experimenting with drugs and felt strongly about the negative complications in doing so. But, it was also shown that if parents discussed their own past drug use, the warning to their children was reportedly less effective.
Thus, parents may want to think twice before they tell their children about past substance abuse problems.
Also, today.com quoted Andreea Crauciuc, a licensed social worker who counsels addicted teens as saying, “I’ve certainly heard from teenagers what they think about their parents’ substance abuse. A lot of times what I hear is, ‘My parents turned out OK.’ The implication is that if the parents used drugs and turned out OK then the teen will, too.”
Crauciuc said that the biggest message for children is what parents actually do, as opposed to what they say. “Parents are a very strong template for the models of who the children should be,” she said. “I think verbal content is absorbed very differently than the information kids get through observation.”
Not everyone believes that parent’s pasts should be withheld from their children. But, most agree that parents who do want to talk about their own drug use with their children should plan carefully what they are going to say beforehand. It is important is simply to keep talking to your children; keeping the lines of communication open. And parents must decide ahead of time if they should share their past drug abuse with their children.