Illustration: Hannah Buckman
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When my children were young, I never sought advice from friends and certainly not from experts, because I was one of those (arguably very boring) parents who blindly trusted their instincts. My instincts seem to have served me pretty well so far, but I find myself trusting them less than before. Maybe I lived my childhood in blissful ignorance and finally realized how little I really knew.
Partying with teenagers, for example: what is the protocol here? Are we supposed to encourage all forms of social gathering since it’s better than sitting at home on their phones? Is weed also supposed to be decriminalized at home? Are kids still using fake IDs to get alcohol, even though IDs now have scanning features? And at the risk of committing a cringeworthy kamikaze, what artistic terms are currently used by young people to describe the substances of their choice? Did I just hear my 12 year old disdainfully refer to a vape as a “geek bar”?
Having no answers myself, I talked to as many parents of teens and young adults as I could. I heard stories that both tormented and comforted me. But I think everything will be fine.
No matter how much trust we build with our teenagers, one inviolable truth is that drugs are stronger than they used to be.
“We weren’t prepared for this,” the mother of an 18-year-old from a southern city told me. “There’s a park by the river where a lot of high school kids go to party. Our son called after midnight and he said, ‘I’m sorry, we all ate a bunch of mushrooms and I can’t put my boyfriend in an Uber.’ facial recognition to be able to call his father back, but it didn’t work.
It took two people to load the friend into her car, and she was able to find her address in the glove compartment of her car. “We had to drive across town, knock on this family’s door at 1 a.m. and say, ‘Hi, we haven’t met. Your son is in my car high on mushrooms.'”
A Brooklyn father told a similar story: His 16-year-old son called late at night from his friend’s house to the more permissive parents, who weren’t home because someone was freaking out over mushrooms. In both cases, the parents were simply relieved to have received a call and did not want to jeopardize that trust by suppressing the anger. “We just realized we couldn’t scold him or punish him. It doesn’t matter anymore, one way or another. It’s a confusing place to find yourself,” the father said.
Another source of confusion is weed, which over the past two decades has become virtually undetectable and executioner-grade. (Thanks to Josh, a guy I knew in high school whose bong was called The Executioner – simpler times.)
One mother I spoke to told me that as her son graduated high school and became more open with her, he admitted that he had been high for months during his sophomore year of high school, and she didn’t notice. “Looking back, we said to ourselves: Wow, okay. He’s a private person, so it was really hard to tell.
Another South West mum watched her 15-year-old daughter sink into a year-long depression which, she later learned, involved heavy self-medication with cannabis – which she, too, was slow to detect, due to the absence of telltale odors. “I wasn’t equipped for her to be able to easily buy stuff. Whether it’s through Snapchat, it’s definitely available,” she said.
Alcohol may not be easier to obtain than in previous decades, but parental attitudes towards it may be changing in a bid to ensure that trust and lines of communication remain intact. Indeed, no parent I spoke to was comfortable playing narc. A mother who worked as a lawyer while her children were in high school had a strict policy of prohibiting underage drinking in her home — in part, she said, for reasons of professional convenience. “But what they did in front of my house didn’t worry me too much.”
Income and geography play an important role. In affluent suburbs, several moms I spoke to seemed like it was somewhat de rigeur for parents to provide alcohol at their teens’ parties. “I think it’s the desire to seem cool, to seem permissive,” a mother from a Connecticut suburb told me.
“Here, parents allow drinking,” she continues. When her daughter was 14 and a freshman in high school, she was getting ready for a party at a friend’s house, and the friend’s mother called to see if she could give each of the girls a can of High Noon. “I remember telling him, ‘I’ll have to think about it and call you back.’ My husband and I talked and agreed that it was really messed up. Fourteen ? I called her back and said, ‘Look, you can do whatever you want with your daughter, but I don’t want my daughter to drink.’
“A lot of senior parties have open bars,” a mom from the southwest suburbs told me. “I felt like it was weird. There’s a shift at some point where some parents want to share that with their kids. But I would never buy alcohol for kids. It’s just a hard line.”
That being said, this mom allows alcohol in her backyard because “one way or another they buy it,” she said of the cans of Truly and Coors Lite that end up in her recycling bins. “I’m fine as long as I know no one is driving. And I don’t want to know how you got it.”
Of course, phones have a role to play in all of this. A father in Montreal I spoke with received a screenshot of a Snapchat post of his 14-year-old son and his friends posing with a vape, a vodka Mickey and what appeared to be a bottle of prescription pills. “My knees went a little weak when I saw him,” the father recalls. “We had a long conversation afterwards and told him he was never allowed to take pills.”
After his son came home very late on several occasions, this father began to locate his son. “I’m not into all that. We didn’t used to locate him,” the dad said, but for now it brings some peace of mind.
Tracking, a handful of parents admit, seems to create as many problems as it solves, with their teenagers lying and becoming more evasive when followed. But it’s a mixed bag, especially after midnight. A mother from a rural area was waiting for her daughter to return from a party in the woods, to a location known to the community at large. Starting to worry, she checked where her daughter was: it was at the local hospital, so she rushed over. “Even though I was upset they didn’t call us, her friends did a really good job taking care of her.”
Her 15-year-old daughter had become very drunk and her friends found something disturbing in her behavior, so they brought her in. “If I had seen her, I wouldn’t have made this decision,” the mother said. “She just drank too much.” The mother took her home and put her to bed. But the rumor had started to work, and his daughter had woken up to exaggerated stories about his drunkenness, his “disorderly” behavior, his seizures.
“It was a shitty experience, but it was also the kind of experience where you learn that things can get out of hand very quickly. Friends have done a lot of good things. I would rather these situations happen here, with people who have known her since she was young, than when she goes off to college.”
It would seem that the biggest status marker among parents of this generation is being seen as a trusted adult. Perhaps this is why no one I spoke to took a hard-line approach to drugs and alcohol; they would rather be someone who hears the honest story and can be available to help someone who needs it rather than someone who is associated with consequences and disappointment. Being sober yourself can be a godsend: you can still be counted on to drive.
A Washington, D.C.-area mother of four became sober after her older children had already graduated from high school. “With my two oldest, it was common for me to drink about four times a week,” she said. “But I got to the point where if they needed me to pick them up, I couldn’t really do it. That was part of my motivation to get sober.”
One New Year’s Eve, when she had stopped drinking and her youngest daughter was in high school, she received a call from the younger sister of one of her daughter’s friends. “These girls, their mother had died of cancer a few years earlier, and their father was actively dating – he was out, it was New Year’s Eve. But word had spread through the friend group that I was sober and you could call me. Here’s this first grader, and she’s completely drunk. She’s overwhelmed. And thanks to friends, she knew to call me. That made me feel good.”
There’s one thing that every parent I’ve spoken with has shared: the basic assumption that they have some idea of what’s going on with their teen. In this regard, I think we belong to the proud tradition of people who don’t know what they don’t know. We are all defenseless in the face of unknown unknowns. All we can really control is how we choose to react.
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