Parents Are Called Key to Drug-Free Children

A 3-year-old boy gazes at a new video. From his seat on the living room couch, the episode looks and sounds to him a lot like Saturday morning cartoons--flashy super heroes popping with super powers.

But the stories and messages of “The Drug Avengers” bear little resemblance to those of the Muppett Babies or Scooby Doo: Three youngsters and an alien sidekick travel through time from 100 years hence to help 20th-Century earthlings wise up to drug abuse. The heroes in it are kids. The villains: pills, booze, cigarettes, dope, addiction.

One catchy rap tune that the Avengers sing grabs the boy’s attention: “A girl named Maggie had a little Baggie, full of something white, something didn’t look right; she said, ‘C’mon, check it out,’ but I cut out instead, ‘cause I listened to the voice inside of my head, it said, ‘Uh-oh!’ ”

Later, the child begs his dad to “play the uh-oh song” again. And again. The father asks the boy if he knows what the song is about. The boy shakes his head in the negative.

When Larry Lancit and Cecily Truett say the fight to save America’s children from drug abuse needs more super heroes, they aren’t talking about animated ones like those in the “Avengers” video they produced. They mean parents.

“We wanted to create something that would be used by kids and their parents together,” say the husband-and-wife team whose concern for their own 5-year-old daughter and a grant from the U.S. Department of Education motivated them to create “The Drug Avengers” last year. Since then, the video, aimed at children from preschool to sixth grade, has been distributed to 18,000 school districts and now is available for home use.

“It’s hard for parents to get a handle on talking to their kids about drugs,” says Lancit, whose New York company, Lancit Media Productions, maker of such PBS programs as “Reading Rainbow” and “Romona,” co-produced this video with RNC Research Corp.

“The idea was to use entertainment as . . . a real focal point in the home for talking about drugs,” Lancit says. “We wanted to produce something that when a 5-minute episode is over, the child and parent could have a meaningful discussion.”

A Lou Harris poll on the American family recently disclosed that 9 out of 10 parents are concerned about their children coming into contact with illicit drugs and alcohol. Yet, meaningful family discussion in the home about drug and alcohol abuse is not the norm, according to concerned experts. Most parents instead rely on schools to inform their children about substance abuse.

Government, too, has typically bolstered police- and school-based programs, seldom seeing parents as a critical part of the solution. Even “The Drug Avengers” was created for school use and had to be revised for parents. An editorial piece in the New York Times 10 years ago expressed the attitude that has remained prevalent through much of the ‘80s when it contended that drug-abuse prevention was too important an issue “to be left in the hands of parents.”

But that thinking is changing. Last March, the prevention committee of the White House Conference for a Drug-Free America concluded that, “with the tremendous threat of the drug epidemic, it is vital that the first line of defense be the family and parents.”

Increasingly, experts advocate that parents take steps as early as the preschool years to develop the personal skills and values in their children needed to keep them free of drugs. Some even warn that if American parents don’t learn to handle “drug talks” with their children better than they have traditionally handled “sex talks,” the war on drugs may well be lost.

“An informed parent is the best bulwark against drug use by young people,” says Doug Hall, spokesman for the National Parent Resource Institute for Drug Education. Headquartered in Atlanta, the institute emerged as a maverick organization 12 years ago when it began proposing that parents “put themselves between drugs and their children.” That was a time when parents intervening in drug problems brought to mind images of parents rifling through drawers and angry confrontations.

A Gradual Development

The institute’s program stresses a gradual and developmental approach “that inculcates in the child, over many years, the family’s values and standards, and provides techniques to avoid the problems outside the home,” Hall says. The theory is that if parents warn children of the choices they will probably be asked to make, and explain the family standards, children are more likely to make the right decisions. The institute’s surveys of children’s attitudes indicate these discussions should take place no later than fourth grade.

But there’s an obstacle. “In many cases, today, the parent is less informed about drug use than children are,” Hall says. “It’s like the mama and papa telling the kid about the birds and the bees, and the child looks up and says, ‘That sounds a little like making love.’ ”

Children today are drinking and taking drugs earlier than ever. Elementary schoolchildren, 100,000 of them, “get drunk at least once a week,” according to the American Council for Drug Education. As early as the fourth grade, one of three children reports pressure from classmates to try wine coolers. One in 14 children begins using marijuana before age 14. The average age of first use today has dropped to under 12. Almost a fifth of all children between 9 and 12 have been approached to try illegal drugs, says the Media-Advertising Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

Another obstacle to home-based approaches in preventing drug abuse is that most parents are entrenched in denial and blame. “They don’t think this precious child of theirs would ever use drugs,” says Anne Meyer, president of the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth, based in Deerfield, Ill. “So to get them interested in preventive measures is very difficult.”

The federation’s program tries to debunk that myth by informing parents about how drugs and alcohol affect the underdeveloped bodies and growing minds of youngsters. “Alcohol, for instance,” Meyer says, “takes 5 to 15 years for adults to become alcoholic. It takes less than 6 months for a child. Cocaine is a rapid addiction drug for adults, and much more rapid in children . . . interrupting the circuits in their brains and affecting their reproductive systems. Kids on drugs are anesthetizing themselves and missing things they should be developing at their age--reasoning ability, physical growth.”

Action Urged

That prospect shakes most parents into taking action. “Once they understand, they do what they need to do,” says Meyer, who believes kindergarten is a prime time to get started. She recommends talking with kindergartners about their own bodies, about caring about themselves, about not taking things from strangers. Children a little older need instruction on handling peer pressure. “The actual drug information comes a little later, in the fourth or fifth grade,” Meyer says.

“But it isn’t like saying, ‘So now you are 9 years old and we’re going to tell you all about drugs.’ One problem is that some people give them too much too soon or too little too late. This is a process, not an event. This is helping children develop their own personal skills and build their self-esteem. But if you do all of that and never mention drugs, you haven’t done your job as a parent.”

Some experts blame parents’ paralysis in protecting young children from drug abuse on fear of not being a good parent. Does a tough stance work or drive the child to abuse? Is a little knowledge about drugs a dangerous thing? Lee Dogoloff, executive director of the American Council for Drug Education, says that parents learn most of what they know about parenting from what their own parents did with them. And that shortchanges today’s parents on proper and effective approaches to prevent drug abuse.

“This is unfamiliar territory for them,” says Dogoloff, a former presidential adviser on drug policy. “People tend to make it more difficult than it needs to be. We need to think about it in terms reinforcing the message over and over again. Children need to know you are serious about it.”

He likens the process to teaching kids to turn off the lights when they leave a room. “You hear that over and over again as a child,” Dogoloff says. “What you don’t hear over and over is don’t use alcohol and drugs.”

As for starting early, Dogoloff says that is critical too. “Parents need to get to kids at a time when they still have the credibility. For a young child, parents are still omnipotent, and they really do believe them.”

When Ken Barun talks to parents about their messages to children on substance abuse, he starts with the subtle messages communicated through actions rather than words. The first step for parents, he says, is to “take stock of your own position and addictions.

Toeing the Line

“Becoming a parent is like joining the Army--if you don’t like the sound of reveille and don’t like crew cuts, then don’t enlist,” says Barun, co-author of “How to Keep the Children You Love Off Drugs” (The Atlantic Monthly Press: $12.95). “Parents have got to be responsible for their children’s behavior. And parents need to toe the line themselves.”