TEST DOING DRUGS WITH
PAUL DILLON

Anyone who has ever seen me present to secondary school students knows that one of the basic foundations of my approach is the promotion of 'positive norms' - i.e., letting young people know that most adolescents do not necessarily drink to excess and that the vast majority of school-based young people are not using illicit drugs. What I do is 'flip the figures' - taking the data on how many people take part in such behaviour and then turn it on its head - looking at those who don't do it! What this hopefully does is make those not involved in those activities feel good about their choices, particularly in a world that is constantly hammering the message that all teens take drugs and binge drink! This is known as the 'social norms' approach. The idea evolved from research conducted in the mid 1980s by two American researchers, H.W. Perkins and A.D. Berkowitz, when they reported that college students involved in their studies held exaggerated beliefs about th...

Adolescence is such a difficult time for both teens and their parents. As their mind and body is changing, the child is trying to work out exactly where they fit in the world, struggling to establish an identity that is separate and distinct from that of their parents. At the same time parents are desperately trying to stay connected to a creature that they sometimes barely recognize as the little boy or girl that they seemed to have a loving and warm relationship with only a short time before! When parents contact me to discuss the problems with their teen (particularly in relation to alcohol and other drugs) I usually feel pretty helpless. Firstly, I am not a psychologist or counsellor and don't have training in assisting parents (or young people) in that way, and secondly, when I talk to those professionals who do have the expertise they are very clear that there aren't simple answers to these type of problems and usually the family is just going to have to ...

So many things can go wrong when hosting a teen party, with even the best planned event sometimes going 'pear-shaped'! Ensuring that all partygoers are safe is paramount and that can be really difficult when you're dealing with teens who are 'missing a piece of their brain' ... The dramatic increase in pre-parties (where young people drink just enough to avoid detection when they enter the main party of the night) makes this even more difficult for those putting on parties. As I've said many times before, the most important thing parents can do is to find out as much about the night your child is planning and then drop them off and pick them up. They're not going to like it and it's not going to be a pleasant experience for you every weekend but at least you'll be more aware of what they're up to and that they're as safe as possible. But even if you do that there are no guarantees ... I'm going to let the following piece written by a Dad ...

In the past year I have met students who have had a wide range of medical conditions including diabetes, peanut allergies, epilepsy, depression, ADHD and cystic fibrosis. All of them approached me after my presentation with exactly the same query - how should they deal with the issue of drinking and did I know anything about the interaction between their medication (and boy, was there a wide assortment there!) and alcohol? The vast majority of these students made it very clear that they weren't drinking at the moment and didn't really think they were going to try anytime soon but thought they'd take the opportunity to ask me what they should do if they ever decided to have some alcohol at a party or the like. A couple of weeks ago, however, I met one young man who was really struggling. He was a great kid and I felt so sorry for him as he was obviously having a difficult time dealing, not only with his medical condition, but also the potential impact his diagnos...

If you were one of the many parents that watched ABC TV's 4 Corners episode 'Dying To Dance' who have never had anything to do with the nightclub or dance festival scene I'm sure you were quite confronted by what you saw. Since it aired a couple of weeks ago I have received a number of emails and phone calls from parents so disturbed by the program that they made contact to try to establish if the program truly represented what was happening at dance festivals across the country. Most of them had sons or daughters that were regular festival-goers and many found it extremely hard to believe that they could be involved in the kind of activity that they saw on the program. Let me start by saying that I thought the program offered a unique insight into a culture that is rarely examined in such detail. Gaining access to dance events is incredibly difficult for the media - no promoter wants a television crew wandering around their event, particularly if the producers are...

What do you say the first time your teen turns around and asks if they can take alcohol to a party they have been invited to? This is the situation a mother I met during the week had recently faced and she found herself really struggling with how to respond ... Tina's son Adrian is 16 and has found it really difficult since he started at a new school two years ago to find a group of friends. Last week he was invited to his first teenage party and, although a bit worried about the whole 'party thing', she was also thrilled that this could be the beginning of him finally starting to 'fit in' ... Unfortunately straight after she said he could go, he threw her a curly one and asked if he could take alcohol. According to Adrian, everyone else was going to take a couple of drinks and he didn't want to be the only one who didn't. Tina certainly didn't feel comfortable giving her son alcohol to take to a party (and she made it clear to me, it was never going t...

During the week I met two mothers who had both recently discovered that their daughters had been taking ecstasy. Both were very worried and wanted advice on what to do now that they had this information. After finding out what their daughters were up to, both had confronted them with what they knew, aired their disappointment and concerns but were told in no uncertain terms that they had no intention of changing their behaviour and that they were worrying about nothing and that 'everyone does it'! Both of these mums were pretty amazing. It seemed like they had been able to keep their cool when discussing the issue with their daughters, knowing only too well that if they had exploded and ranted and raved, they really did risk jeopardising the already tenuous relationship they had with their child. But you could really see how frightened they were and when one of them said to me - "I just don't want to wake up one weekend and find her face on the front page of the paper ...