THE BIG QUESTION: HOW DO YOU TALK TO THIS CHILD ABOUT DRUGS?

When Tiffany Dayton, 14, and Stephanie Dayton, 11, go to their pantry
for a snack or for the ingredients to make dinner, they are reminded
not to do drugs. At the front of the shelf, at eye level, there is a
box that doesn't contain food -- it's a home drug-testing kit. It
remains unused. But the girls know that their parents could choose to
test them. And that is a pretty convincing deterrent.

"I know a lot of people, my friends, they don't want to use drugs,
but peer pressure is really hard," says Tiffany. "You really have to
learn how to tell people you aren't interested."

When Craig Dayton first brought the kit into the family's Chandler
home, he placed it on the counter, walked away and waited to get
everyone's attention. Right away, his oldest daughter noticed it.

"She picked it up, looked at it and said, 'Oh, cool. When do I get to
try it?' " he recalls. "I knew then and there that I didn't have a problem."

"I thought it was pretty cool," says Tiffany. She opened the box to
examine the small plastic cup, with its top that changes colors to
indicate what, if any, drugs are in your system. "I wanted to see how
it works."

Dayton says having the kit in such a prominent place in the home has
helped the family to regularly talk about drug use and abuse. The
conversation started when the girls were in elementary school. He
tells the girls that if they are ever caught using, not only will he
call the parents of the friends they were with, but also the police.

"Not to get them in trouble," he says, "but to get them help."

Tiffany says she is completely comfortable talking with her parents
about drugs, and having the test at home is a relief. She says she
doesn't see her dad's warnings as threats, but as a way of supporting
her and her sister.

In fifth grade, Tiffany went through the Drug Abuse Resistance
Education program at school and said she learned about how drugs can
be harmful.

"D.A.R.E. teaches you excuses that work great in elementary school --
'Let's play checkers' or 'Let's rent a movie' -- but they don't
really work in middle school," she says. "Now I can say, 'If you give
it to me, you might as well turn yourself in to the cops.' It's a
much stronger way of saying 'No.' "

To some parents Dayton's approach might seem like tough love, or even
an invasion of privacy, but he says it's his way of keeping his girls safe.

Studies have shown that the average age kids try alcohol is 11 and
drugs is 12, with some kids trying them much younger.

Those numbers have spurred public service campaigns and educational
programs that encourage parents to talk to even their youngest kids
about drugs, but what to say remains the question in many minds.

"Kids hear a lot in rumorville, and they feel like experts," says
Stephanie Kreiling, an educator for Community Bridges of Mesa, a drug
abuse prevention organization. "But they don't want to showcase this
expertise to parents for fear that they will appear to know too much.
At the same time, parents feel that they don't know much about what's
out there and don't want to show their ignorance to their kids," she
says. "The result is that no one talks about it."

Not talking about it is the worst thing you can do, say local experts.

"You have to bring it up. You can't just wait," Kreiling says.

Before the sixth grade, children see issues as black and white, and
if you talk to them about drugs, she says, they will see that abusing
them is wrong. As they get older, things get a little gray.

"In elementary school, you have your most captive audience," says
Kreiling. "Kids will really listen to you, at least up until that point."

Dayton got his home drugtesting kit after participating in a program
in the Kyrene Elementary School District called Project 7th Grade
(although the kits are now available at many drugstores for about
$30). The project is part of the nonprofit education and outreach
program NotMYKid, which aims to educate parents about drugs and teach
them how to talk about them with their kids.

"It's cool that it's available to parents," says Tiffany. "Parents
don't learn as much as we do about drugs."

Debbi Moak of Phoenix started NotMYKid after her own family struggled
with drug use, and the program has since gone nationwide, educating
parents on issues from drug use to depression to eating disorders.

Moak says parents need to talk early and often to kids about drugs,
but need to first get educated on the subject themselves.

"Parents believe they know today's drugs," she says. They may think
the marijuana available today, for example, is the same as what was
on the streets in the 1960s, but she says it's not.

"Know what it looks like," she says, "know what kids look like who
are on it, know what the paraphernalia looks like."

Moak says every family should have a drug prevention plan to spell
out how they will work together to make sure drugs are not abused.

"Kids are under so much pressure, and we have the opportunity to
eliminate some of it. We need to stand up and protect our kids on
every level," she says.

Through Moak's program, drug-testing kits have been distributed to a
couple thousand East Valley families. Educators with the program
travel to area schools and meet with groups of parents, talking with
them about drugs and teaching them what they need to know to keep
their kids from using.

Moak says the drug kits are one tool parents can use. "I think our
kids are looking at us to set boundaries. You prevent kids from
getting poor grades by making sure they study, by looking at their
report card. But what are we doing, when it comes to drugs, to verify
that those doors aren't being opened?"

Start by explaining to young children that even medicines that are in
the home to make you feel better can hurt you.

"Say, 'You see that medicine in the cabinet, you don't want to take
too much of it,' " says Kreiling. "Even very young kids understand that."

Kreiling and Moak encourage parents to use current events to start drug talks.

"If there is a drug bust on the nightly news, ask them, 'Has that
ever happened at school, that someone has been caught with drugs?' "
says Kreiling. "That's an indirect and not threatening way to do it."

Moak says to emphasize the consequence for using drugs -- for
instance, being arrested. She also advocates using a reward system
for kids who don't use drugs -- for instance, providing them with a
cell phone for as long as they stay drug-free.

And what if kids ask the question dreaded by many parents who grew up
in the 1960s and 1970s: "Have you done drugs?"

Kreiling says she understands both telling them you have and, if you
have, telling them you haven't.

"The important thing to remember is that you are the parent now. If
you don't want to tell them, don't. If you do, don't go into detail
and don't glamorize it."

What about riffling through sock drawers and peeking under the mattresses?

"Parents are worried about an invasion of privacy, but they shouldn't
be because it is their home," says Kreiling. "Hopefully, you've been
setting boundaries all along and your children understand they
can'thide things from you there.

"It's your right to question them," she says. "If you don't find
anything, that's where you build trust, I think."

www.NotMYkid.org

www.health.org

www.drugfree.org

www.drugfreeaz.org