Drug Prevention Education
Families face challenges that can be easily delt with if they know how to handle them. Kids can’t be left on ‘auto-pilot’ and be expected to know right from wrong actions. Kids are very much like blank slates — almost anything can be written onto them.
What information do your kids learn about drugs and alcohol everyday?
You should turn on your TV set, go on line, or check out your spam box in your email folder to find out how much drugs and alcohol are being promoted directly to your kids. Drugs, medical and non-medical, are promoted to make life happier, to assist them to be more popular and be healthier. Yet, these are artificial conditions created by drug pushers and marketers.
Utopia is not a place where no one has to do anything and everything is done for one — like the ‘Axiom’ space ship in the movie “Wall-E”. Heaven isn’t a bar where everyone drinks Budweiser, Miller, Canadian or Coors beer. Yet if you watch TV or commercials, you may get a different idea. Watch and listen as if you were your kids age.
Add to the mix school grounds where it only takes one kid who likes to take chances and you’ve got yourself a potential drug / alcohol playgroud for pre-teens. Kids are very curious about drugs and alcohol. What they need is clear meanings, effects and standards by which they can live their lives. For that, they will need your clear guidance.
The problem with parenting today is that society, technology and communications are advancing faster than ever before in history. There may be no way to deal with all the changes, but you can establish some certainties along the way for you kids.
Drug Facts
Although sometimes medical drugs are necessary to take, all drugs including alcohol are essentially poisons. This may seem harsh or unpalatable to adults who enjoy wine with dinner. Yet, an adult has already physically grown up and matured. Their minds have differentiated many importance’s and trivial situations.
Kids know two things: what is fun and what they like and what isn’t fun and what they don’t like. To a kid, if they like something they will do it a lot. Find out or watch how many times your kid watches the same movie or listens to the same song or repeats a pleasant action.
When educating kids about drugs, it is far better to focus on the damaging effects and the side effects of drugs and alcohol than the so called ‘benefits’. The more you pay attention to something, the more real it becomes.
Tibor A. Palatinus
Narconon Drug Prevention Specialist