Addiction and Parents [Blog #4]

This week we talked about addiction and did an experiment to see how an addict feels, how people react to the odd behavior of an addict, etc. I can't post my ice cube blog yet because I started it after everyone else since I was absent for two days, so I decided to look for videos that were about addiction. The link below takes you to a two or three minute video about a mom who talks about how crappy life is after your kid overdoses.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqDm_IjN2VY

What I paid attention to wasn't what she was saying, but just how surprised she seemed that her son was doing drugs. Toward the end of the video she briefly mentions something along the lines of not knowing what he was into.

Part of me is thinking how can you not notice that your child is on heroin?! I feel as though his behavior would have been so different compared to before the addiction. But the rest of me knows exactly how she wouldn't know. Stereotypically speaking, teens are pretty good at lying to their parents. It's probably not that hard to pass off withdrawal as a stomach bug. And a lot of parents don't want to believe that their kid is going through something like that. If your kid is doing drugs, you're going to feel like a failure as a parent. So you're gonna be in denial and you're gonna rationalize every abnormal behavior and suspicion. And it's so sad to me that parents can't just own up to the fact that their child may be on drugs. Don't get me wrong, I understand the situation as much as I can without actually being a parent. But it just seems to me that a few lives could be saved, if parents and friends would just open their eyes a little.