How Parents Can Steer Teens Along Straight, Narrow

Here they are, your own flesh and blood, looking at you--when they pay attention at all--like you’re the abominable no-man. They’re at the threshold of the dreaded teen years, and they’ve seen all those movies, TV shows and music videos. So how are you going to keep them off sex and drugs?

It can be done, says Linda M. Grossman, but you’ve got to invest some time and energy to do it.

Grossman is a Laguna Niguel psychologist who has just co-authored a book: “Kids, Drugs & Sex: Preventing Trouble.” It’s aimed at parents and is filled with exercises for both parents and children that are designed to improve communication.

For instance, one exercise for parents is aimed at getting them to define clearly their feelings on their child’s developing sexuality so they can explain their position to the offspring. The work sheet has one column for a parent to list the child’s age when the parent could accept things such as going on a date, kissing briefly, hugging or having sexual intercourse. Another column allows the parent to list the age at which the same activities are likely to occur with or without the parent’s permission.

A joint exercise calls on the parent and the child to make decisions on what they would do in various situations the adolescent is likely to confront: a friend offering a cigarette; going to a weekend party where there will be a lot of drinking; visiting the home of a boyfriend or girlfriend who is stepping up the pressure to become more intimate and whose parents conveniently are out of town.

In all, there are two dozen exercises in the book. They may sound basic and they may be largely common sense, but Grossman says what sounds simple on paper often becomes difficult when reality intrudes.

“Most teens think, ‘Yes, teen-agers should talk to their parents,’ ” she said, “but when you ask how many do, few hands go up. The same is true of parents.”

Grossman said she believes that “sometimes parents just give up and feel, ‘Well, gosh, their peer group is so important now, and I’m out of the picture,’ but that’s not really true.” She said the message to parents should be, “You are powerful, and you can do a lot to help your kids.”

After receiving a Ph.D. in psychology from Indiana University, Grossman worked with 2,000 children and their parents as part of a program at USC to keep teen-agers off drugs.

Her two-year study found that students who took part in a classroom drug-abuse program were off drugs for a year after the course ended, but then did no better in staying drug-free than students who had not received the course.

But a group “in which parents did the homework with their children, and learned skills together” produced kids who were staying off drugs more than a year and a half after the program ended.

As a result, in her work since the 1983-84 study, “The angle that I took that was really different was how you get parents involved . . . to spread the kinds of skills I was teaching kids, about how to say ‘no’ and how to feel good about yourself and how to make decisions, the things in that book.”

Grossman, 34 and a former director of psychological services at Capistrano by the Sea Hospital in Dana Point, acknowledged that she had twinges of thinking, “Oh, kids this age are not going to want to talk to their parents about these issues,” but said it turned out that the teens she worked with were willing to talk under certain conditions.

If parents refrain from bellowing, “What do you do?” or “What’s going on in your life?” and instead use exercises that both sides can focus on “without any judgments,” teens “say they really like it,” Grossman said.

“I was really surprised. I was shocked. Because I thought 13- or 14-year-olds, they don’t want to have anything to do with their parents. But they seemed to like it a lot.”

Grossman said parents can start raising the issues of sex and drugs with children as young as 6 or 7.

She suggests asking a child what she thinks about an advertisement for an alcoholic beverage, for instance, or explaining “what love is all about and loving relationships.”

She said the objective is to keep communicating, so that sex and drugs don’t become “a big taboo topic.”

Grossman put the “really critical” age at around 12 or 13, when children begin experimenting.

Unfortunately, she said, “that’s the time where they’re also likely to say, ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with you, mom and dad.’ So it’s real important for the parents to make the overtures, rather than feel embarrassed or uncomfortable.”

Grossman said the book requires parents to work at helping their children, not just think about problems or talk about them.

“Talk doesn’t do anything,” she said. “You talk to 12-year-old kids and you say, ‘Are you going to use drugs?’ and they all say, ‘No way. I’m not going to use drugs.’ And you go back a year later and you say, ‘Well, have you used drugs?’ and they say, ‘Well, yeah, I’ve tried it.’ And then you ask them, ‘Well, why?’ and they say, ‘Well, I just was with so-and-so.’ All the intentions in the world are great, but if you don’t know how to refuse or be assertive or stand up for yourself it’s not going to work. . . . I want parents to talk to the kids. I want them to take the time.”

“Kids, Drugs & Sex: Preventing Trouble” (Clinical Psychology Publishing Co., $19.95) is available at Fahrenheit 451 bookstore in Laguna Beach.