How to Tell Your Kids NOT to Use Cannabis

Without feeling like a total hypocrite

I have thought a great deal about how to keep my child from using cannabis. I first tried cannabis when I was 18 year old, and I now know that would be too young for his developing mind, but I will expect my child to make adult decisions when he’s a mature adult. Until then, I know that cannabis would be harmful to his development and his health, and the American Psychiatric Association agrees, so I have been pondering what I can say or do to keep it out of his system.

My thinking on this started well before I became a parent. I was a public High School teacher in New York City and Boston, and it was there I began to formulate a plan for how to talk to young people about cannabis use. I knew some of my students were smoking cannabis. It wasn’t that they talked about it; some of them arrived blatantly stinking of roasted flower. Some of them arrived roasted themselves.

I have a long history of teaching. I was a Red Cross swim instructor in high school and college. I was a camp counselor and waterfront director at a summer sleepaway camp. I’ve been a teacher, a tutor, and a guidance counselor. I enjoy the challenge of adapting a message in a way kids will appreciate and internalize. Using cannabis was the hardest topic I’ve had to broach.

For years I simply avoided the issue. It was not my job to talk to my students about cannabis, though it wasn’t forbidden if I was intelligent about it. I never caught a kid using in school, though I served on the disciplinary committee and considered cases of students caught in compromising cannabis situations.

My biggest fear was having the wrong effect. I did not want to convince anyone to use cannabis. They may come to that decision on their own; it would be wholly inappropriate for a High School teacher to encourage. I don’t know how many of my students smoked cannabis, but I know the ones who were obviously intoxicated were among the least successful students I taught.

I also did not want any cannabis users in the class to tune me out, thinking I didn’t understand them. I knew if I came down hard against cannabis — It will ruin your life! It will destroy your future! It will lead you down the path to Heroin! — I would come across like all the other droning adults who didn’t have real cannabis experience themselves, and so came across as ignorant or disingenuous.

If you tell a kid that cannabis will ruin their life, when they try cannabis and see that’s not true, your overall credibility will be damaged. So, here is what I said:

The problem with cannabis is that it makes you okay with being bored. Kids need to hate being bored. Boredom gets you off the couch and into your creative space. Boredom builds things. Escaping boredom gives you the ideas that you will use someday to become successful. If you are okay with being bored, you won’t grow and it will be much harder to succeed.

That’s the gist of it. I also talked much more specifically about the problems aggressive cannabis use can cause, especially in school.

You sit down in the morning with plenty of energy, then crash a few hours later. You’re going to have a harder time making friends with good people who are not interested in cannabis. You’re going to spend time looking for more, or spend your money buying more, and most kids have a full schedule and empty wallets already.

For my own son, I will add that I do not want him using cannabis. I have parental authority, and he should know specifically how I feel about this. My opinion of character carried less weight with my High School students, but to my own child I know my opinion matters. Even when he rejects me, he still mimics my behavior.

I would never use cannabis in front of him. Once he’s 21 (more than 10 years from now), if he decides to use cannabis, I might like to be there to set an example. My father set a very good example for me with alcohol. He drank socially, only occasionally, and never to excess. His behavior barely changed when he drank, though he is a happy drinker.

At huge family parties like Bar Mitzvahs and weddings, he’d hand me the dregs of a whiskey sour, but no more than that. He did not make a big deal of it, and he did not refill my glass. While I’ve had times in my life when I needed to cut back on my cannabis use, I’ve never had that problem with alcohol.

Whatever you say, I believe it is important to talk to your kids about cannabis use, and to be open about what you want from them. You may not want to discuss your own history in detail, but they have been guided by you their entire lives, whether they behave the way you’d like or not. You are the guardrails on their road of life, and it’s important you let them know where this particular exit leads.