TEST DOING DRUGS WITH
PAUL DILLON

I'm sure many of you who read the title of this entry looked at it in disbelief and said surely that isn't a question that any parent in their right mind would ever even consider but sadly I'm hearing this more and more, right across the country. If it's not an actual account with Uber or a taxi company, there are more and more parents who are quite happy handing over a wad of cash to their teen so that they can 'safely' catch a cab home after attending a party or gathering on a Saturday night. And if you think I'm just talking about 17 year-olds here, I'm not. Sadly we're seeing Year 10s and even younger who are finding their own way home from these events. If you don't believe me, ask any taxi driver who works on a Saturday night how many very young teens they are increasingly being asked to pick-up from (as well as take to) parties. They will also tell you that many of them refuse the fares, particularly the pick-ups, because of the state some...

When it comes to teenage parties and gatherings there are some simple parenting rules I believe are incredibly important, all of which help to ensure your child's safety. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll highlight each of these in my blog entries and try to flesh them out a little in an effort to assist parents to understand why they are so important and provide some tips on how to put them into action. Let me start by saying that none of them will be easy and I am sure that your teen will not like you doing them but parenting isn't easy and hopefully you didn't become a parent and expect to be 'liked' all the time ... Adolescence is a time when young people are trying to establish their own identity, pulling away from their parents and becoming more influenced by same-age peers. I've talked about this before but in his book You and Your Adolescent , Laurence Steinberg says that 14-18 is "a time for distinguishing oneself from the crowd". He say...

As I travel around the country at the moment I am busy collecting information from some of the young people attending my presentations. I'm focussing on Year 10s and 11s and asking some of them to fill out a short questionnaire. I don't want to know their name or the school they're from so it's completely anonymous but hopefully it will give me greater insight into a couple of areas that I am currently fascinated about in regards to teenagers and how they are being parented (or at least how they perceive they are being parented) in the area of alcohol and parties. It's certainly not a rigorous piece of scientific research and I can't submit any of my 'findings' to a journal for publication. But what it does do is give me a very rough snapshot of what is happening across the country in this area. I really am in a very unique situation in that I get to speak to 10s of thousands of young people every year across all three systems - public, independent and C...

This week I had two parents ask me almost identical questions after one of my presentations - both around the notion of the provision of alcohol in a controlled family setting. One mother wanted to know whether the age-old practice of a son in his late teens (she talked about a 16 year-old) having a beer with his father at home was still appropriate and the other was a father who had been brought up in an Italian family where a small glass of wine was given to the children with a meal. Both acknowledged the message in my talk around 'delay, delay, delay' but wanted to know my thoughts on the whole concept of the importance of providing alcohol in a controlled setting in an effort to hopefully 'teach' a teen to drink responsibly. Firstly, there are no 'rights' or 'wrongs' as far as parenting in this area is concerned. Don't get me wrong, some parental behaviour is truly bizarre in my opinion, but as I've said many times before, no-one can tell you...

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece on Neil, a 16 year-old young man I had recently met who had approached me after my talk extremely concerned about what I had just said about spirits and their potential impacts on a teen's long-term health. What had disturbed him were my comments around the sheer amount of alcohol a young person was consuming when they shared a bottle of vodka between three or four of them (i.e., 21-22 standard drinks - the equivalent of 21 glasses of beer), and the impact that this could have on the developing liver. As I wrote at the time, I'm simplifying the conversation, but essentially this is what Neil said to me: "Do you build a tolerance to alcohol and if you do, what does that actually mean to your health? If you are able to drink a whole lot more than you used to and not get any of the 'drunk' effects, does that mean your liver and the rest of your body are also not getting negative effects? When I drink I usually drink at least a ...

When I stand in front of a group of parents and congratulate them for attending the Parent Information Evening they are attending and tell them that I am really impressed with the numbers, some of them look around the room, their faces clearly showing that they are surprised by what I have just said. There are around 40-50 people in the room and obviously they were expecting to see so many more ... As I always say to the teachers organising an evening session, if you can pull in 20 parents for a talk on alcohol and other drugs, you're doing pretty well! That said, the last two years have seen numbers of parents attending my sessions grow considerably, with many of them pulling in well over 100 interested people and quite a few drawing between 200-300 (a result that any school should be incredibly proud of). The saddest thing is that if I think about the most 'successful' parent sessions (in terms of numbers attending) I have ever held over the years, almost all of th...

Earlier this week I was speaking to a group of Year 12s and at the end of the session two delightful young women came up to me very sheepishly and asked me if they could ask me about something. They had both recently turned 18 years-old and were both desperate to go to a nightclub but were terrified to do so because they were frightened that dealers would approach them while they were there and try to force them to take drugs! They wanted to know what they could do if this happened and did I have any advice on what they could say to these obviously terrifying people if they did indeed try to make them do something they obviously didn't want to do ... I worked in nightclubs and at dance festivals, both here and overseas, for the best part of 25 years and I can count on one hand the number of times I ever had anyone offer me drugs. Even when I did, the person usually said something in a whisper as they were brushing past me, so I can't be absolutely sure that's what th...