According to some poll about young people doing drugs that people pay attention to, kids aren’t telling their parents about the kegger they went to or the bowl of tasty Kush they smoked. The New York Times reports on the bewildering discrepancies, and they’re asking kids about how much their parents know–or more likely don’t know.
The results say only around 10% of parents believe their 13-17 year old is using alcohol, and only 5% believe their kid is smoking cannabis (no mention of ecstasy, acid, mushrooms, cocaine or heroin). This directly contradicts the 2010 Monitoring the Future survey where 52% of 10th graders drank alcohol over the last year, and 28% smoked cannabis. Those are just numbers for sophomores, so you can be sure the higher age bracket of 13-17 is doing it more, and again, there are other drugs.
Any teenager with a modicum of ingenuity and a fear of reprisal would NEVER let their parent’s know about them getting high or drinking alcohol. Sure, there are outliers to any sociological study, but for the most part parents don’t want their kids drinking hooch and smoking grass (or “dope” as my old man called it).
The same parents who believe little Johnny is an angel, think other kids are smoking and drinking at even higher rates, believing that, of their child’s peers, 60% are drinking alcohol and 40% smoking weed.
So, kids will continue to hide their experimentation with drugs like they’ve done for roughly the past 50 years or so, while those same parents complain about all the substances surrounding teenagers these days. The best advice is to talk to your kids about drugs when they’re young; that’s called being a parent.