Teens and Heroin

Michele Catalano writes a great article about why more and more middle and upper middle class white teens are turning to heroin.

"So here was this generation of kids who were led to believe they were each the most special person on the planet. They were kept from harm, kept from failure, kept from any kind of mental anguish. When these kids hit 16 or 17 years old and life started taking on some emotional dramas, and maybe they started to realize they might not get into the college of their choice, an interesting result of how these kids were raised emerged: they have no coping skills. These kids were never taught how to handle duress. They were not taught what to do when things don’t go your way because things always were made to go their way. The pressure their parents put on them to succeed, the normal pressures of applying for college and facing life after high school, together with the realization that they are not special snowflakes and there are thousands of kids just like them out there, all vying for a place in that perfect school, caused a crash and burn for a lot of these kids."

I think she makes a great point. Our instincts as parents tell us to protect our kids at all costs - you look at them for the first time and you just know: you'd throw yourself in front of a speeding bus to save them. But so many parents take that natural protective instinct - the one that keeps you from killing them after they've painted their room with poop - and distort it until it does much more harm than good. We need to let our kids fall down, we need to teach them how to solve their own problems - and we need to do these things early and often. We're raising adults, not children, and in the end we have to equip them to be adults. As unpleasant as that job may be. Because it's what we signed up for.