A friend of mine, a successful professional, posed this parenting dilemma: Suppose your teenager asks you if you ever smoked pot.  Do you tell him the truth?  What if you smoked not just once, or a couple of times, but a fair amount? A whole lot? What if you tried cocaine?

Things are more dangerous now than they were back then, my friend continued. The pot is stronger.  It’s laced with all sorts of other drugs. You don’t want your child to think that if you did it, then it’s ok for them to do the same.  You don’t want to take chances.  You have to lie.

I’ve thought this over, and I have to disagree. I’m mostly talking from my own personal experience.  For one thing, I’m a lousy liar. Bad at poker, too.  When I was a kid, I tried lying, I got caught, and I decided that the price was too high.  It’s not that I’m not tempted.  On the contrary, every day I’m faced with situations where a lie would come in handy (did I really get a good look at that eardrum hidden behind the wax?).  I’ve just come to believe that the truth has a way of coming out, sooner or later, and it’s better sooner than later.

Children, I’ve learned, nearly always know more than their parents think they do.  I pretty regularly run into kids who were adopted and whose parents think it’s a secret. It almost never is.  And parents who think their angry conflicts go unnoticed because they keep quiet until after bedtime.  The kids are rarely fooled.  With pot smoking and other teenage misbehavior, the story is likely to leak out eventually, in an overheard conversation or a comment dropped by a loose-lipped family friend.

Does this mean that you have to confess all to your children?  Of course not! Children don’t ask what they don’t want to know.  And a direct question doesn’t always require an equally direct answer.  “Did you smoke pot when you were in high school, mom?” “That’s a fair question, but I don’t think you’re ready yet for that discussion; we’ll talk about it when you’re older.” Or: “That’s a fair question, but I don’t want to discuss it now.”

You can also respond with a question. When you do this, you’re not simply being evasive or nosy.  You’re trying to find out what lies behind your child’s question.  The discussion might go like this.

 

Child: “Mom, did you smoke pot when you were a kid?”

You: “What makes you ask that now?” (or “How did that subject come up?”)

Child: “Some of the kids were talking, and one of them said that everybody in high school smokes pot.”

 

Here the real question isn’t, “Is it ok for me to smoke” but, “Is it ok for me not to smoke?”

But what if the question is really, Did you smoke?  And what if the truth is, Yes. Fessing up to past misbehavior is not the same as giving permission for it.  Most teens who are old enough to get their hands on drugs are old enough to understand on some level that drugs are dangerous.  And if the fear of being harmed by poisonous substances doesn’t deter them, the thought that their parents never transgressed probably won’t either.  If you feel that drug taking is wrong, you can admit to having done it in the past, and still take a strong stance against it now.  That isn’t being hypocritical.  We all do wrong things from time to time, and can all decide not to do them in the future.

Most importantly, when you tell a hard truth, you teach your children to trust you, and to tell the truth themselves.  There is no better way to teach this particular lesson.