By LILLIAN MERRILL
December 20, 2024
Originally published in Marin IJ
Ever since I started attending public school a couple years ago, one thing I’ve noticed is how little some parents talk to their kids about uncomfortable topics, especially about using drugs or alcohol. Some might have a short talk about how drugs are bad and not to use them. The thing is, they rarely tell their kids why.
Ever since I was little, my mom taught me about drugs. She didn’t just tell me that they’d “fry my brain” or that I’d end up abusing them, but she taught me about addiction, side effects and the risks of taking street drugs. This might seem like a rather advanced topic to talk to a child about but, to my mom, it was something she couldn’t ignore.
Both my parents were addicts in their young adulthood. My mom was a high-functioning alcoholic before she had me, and my dad had an addiction to OxyContin, which had been prescribed to him since he was 10 years old for debilitating migraines. When I was about 2, he went to rehab for a then-recent relapse. Half a year later, my parents divorced when he used again.
After I had been living with just my mom for about six months, as a 3 year old, she started talking to me about “good and bad medicine.” She explained how good medicine is used for a cold or a fever. But sometimes, she explained, people use medicine that turns out to be bad, whether they know it or not.
She explained that bad medicine can make negative impacts on your brain and/or body. A year or two later, she introduced the idea of addiction to me. She explained it to me in a way that, to this day, she is very proud of. She told me to think of an addictive substance as a peanut-butter cookie. After eating one, chances are that you’ll want another peanut-butter cookie. And maybe even another after that. And then another, then another.
In November of 2015, my dad died from an overdose. Sadly, following my parents’ divorce, he started using heroin when he could no longer get OxyContin. The dose of heroin he took on the day he died was laced with fentanyl. This is around when my mom started setting clear boundaries around drugs.
“If you ever do drugs and I find out – and I promise you I will – our lives will change,” she warned. “Because my job will be to save your life. Our life, as it exists, will come to an end, and my one job will be to make sure you don’t die.”
Considering the stakes, my mom really had no other choice but to educate me about drugs from an early age. But something that I’ve wondered is why other parents don’t talk to their kids about heavy topics such as this. I think this is because a lot of parents are just afraid to bring it up. Not just because it’s such a taboo topic, but because they are under the impression that if they don’t bring it up, it doesn’t exist. It might be true for them, but there is no guarantee that it’s the case for their child.
School drug education, usually starting in eighth grade, can’t set boundaries like a parent can. While that formal education is important, it overlooks the role of parents in setting boundaries early, which I consider to be a more effective deterrent. By middle and high school, many kids drift from their parents and often ignore their advice.
As a high school student in Marin, I see the impacts of having no boundaries daily. Nobody needs to be a “helicopter parent,” but all should have real conversations with their kids about substance use. They should set clear boundaries.
Even if a child is using substances now, they need to know the consequences. I’m not a parenting expert, but one big reason as to why kids keep up this behavior is because they just aren’t getting in trouble. Even though they might be resentful of you in the moment, you might save them from a lot later down the line.
Lillian Merrill, of Greenbrae, is a student at Redwood High School. She wrote this as part of an internship as a youth ambassador for the Raising the Bar campaign in collaboration with the Marin 9 to 25 group and Marin Healthy Youth Partnerships.