A lot of you might ask why a parent would do that.
As a divorced parent, I'll say that when you see your kids a handful of days per month, you just want everything to be fun. You don't always spend your time looking for trouble. But sometimes, that's exactly what needs to be done.
I also think it's valid to say that when my generation was in its teenage years in the 70's and 80's, we drank beer and did some experimenting. But by comparison, the things we were into weren't even close to what confronts our kids today.
Unfortunately, these days everything is accessible. Think about it. What would it have been like if we had cell phones and Internet access? We had pay phones. We couldn't text our dealers 24 hours a day. If the people we bought things from weren't home, we were out of luck.
We had no instant access to the latest fads in getting high. Personally, I can't imagine the trouble I might have gotten into if I could Google the phrase, “cheap ways to get high.”
It's also important to remember that easy access isn't the only thing that leads to a dependency problem.
For this particular family, I believe the ugliness of their divorce was a catalyst that fueled the boy's desire to self-medicate and numb himself from the pain and confusion of life at home. He also spent a good deal of time unsupervised, with time to roam around.
Combine those stresses with parents who wanted to believe a drug problem couldn't happen in their family and you've got a recipe for disaster.
As the boy began to slip deeper and deeper into a world of drugs, his behavior became more erratic. His grades and schoolwork suffered tremendously. There were several minor brushes with the law.
