4 Quotes for Parents Before They Judge Someone’s Addicted Teenager
Raising kids has a lot of scary potential scenarios. One of the scariest is if your son gets addicted to drugs. Here are important thoughts around the subject, and in particular, what not to say to parents who find themselves facing it.
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4 min readAug 8, 2021
“I just don’t know what to do anymore.” My cousin, we’ll call him George, was at the end of his rope and so he called me, partially for advice, and partially just for a listening ear.
Recently he discovered his teenage daughter had become addicted to cocaine. Teen drug use is a big problem, growing bigger by the year. Over the last few weeks they worked to break her of it.
Yesterday she relapsed for the third time.
“You’re doing your best,” I’d said. Even now I think back on that line. It had been almost reflex. Conversational. The part that bothers me now when I think about that response is how I was feeling when I said it: judgmental. It had crept up in me without realizing it.
Because really, who was I to judge him?
