Transcript

How can we help students in a world of chemicals? | David Gates with Brian Anderson | TEDxHelena

i'm david this is brian i want to know how many of you are raising children right now oh good we can tell your stuff to scare the heck out here I don't want to do that because my wife reminded me that how much fun it was to raise our three kids I need to keep that in mind when you're doing all this stuff I was blessed by spending 40 years working with adolescents who are using chemicals get in trouble and I will tell you I loved every minute of it anyway we're going to talk because I don't like to talk to groups well Dave thinks we're excited to hear about your expertise with children and chemicals but maybe before we get into that you can just kind of share with us what it was that kind of ignited your passion long ago to work with youth and and how you got into that I worked at a camp for delinquent kids out of institutions as 19 year old and that progressed into going from a civil engineer to I decided that was not my field I met my wife who is going to be a teacher and I decided I wanted to feel working with kids and I spent 40 years doing that and like I said I loved it as a probation officer and a youth treatment counselor what were the kind of common sets of circumstances that children would come to you with what was kind of what shape or position were they and when they came to you generally it was kind of different with probation about 80% the kids I saw were just your children that we're not did something stupid they got in trouble they got cited by the police they came in and saw swee saw him for two or three months and they left we supervise their probation the other twenty percent had lots of things going on their lives that were basically destroying who they were and those kids a lot of them were addicted to chemicals or abusing chemicals their families were are struggling having a really difficult time with things in two thousand my wife and I moved to Washington and we live near Seattle and I became an adolescent drug counselor I was in Bozeman as a probation officer and when I changed occupations basically I ended up working with the exact same kids that twenty percent that I saw as a probation officer I was seeing every day I'd be five hours every week spending time working on addiction issues and just in the past and we've talked about some of the great successes you've had with kids what is the the one reason you would say you were able to to connect so well with kids and be able to have such an impact on changing them I think it's a probably the same reason takes to be a good parent and that's basically building rapport building a relationship God has blessed me with ability to talk with teenagers and even retired I can do that to the point that it takes very little time to build a relationship and I work hard at doing that and that's the same thing I did with my kids and that relationship allowed me to teach them and in teaching them there's no magic and how do you get off chemicals but you need to learn and you need to learn the negative consequences of that and that's basically what I was able to teach them so it sounds like relationship is kind of key to effecting that change how how can you go about building building that relationship either in the work that you did or just as a parent what are some of the keys to to developing that relationship I think as a parent the most important thing you can do is build a relationship where you have communication that works the biggest part a parent can do in that communication role is set an example if you're not setting the right example your children are going to look at that they're going to follow you or they're not one or the other but in senate example you have more power as a parent to influence your child than all the other issues all the other things out there their peers their music internet anything out there you can influence your children and by white by communicating with them that example by talkative about things by spending time with them all the ways you build you bond with your children if you can do that at an early age by the time they hit 10 years you're going to be able to communicate with them you're going to be able to talk to them you're going to be able to share with them what the world's like and you're going to be able to protect them base to get from what's out there and my wife and I and I say my wife and I see probably did more of this and I did but bottom line we have three very healthy children children there forty to forty and 38 but there's still my kids and we have five grandchildren and they're all doing well and they're doing well not because Connie and I did such a great job but we know they Li included them in our life we included them in other healthy adults lives and in from the time they were old enough to get into youth group we would have had them in youth groups they were in soccer or football or whatever those all helped but you know I don't see keeping your kids busy 24 7 doing other things helps raise kids I see it as building that relationship with your family with those people closest to you that's how you raise healthy kids a lot of parents I see get their kids wrapped up in all sorts of activities that can help but the relationship is much more important than that his job is also to keep me on track I kind of get no this is great as a parent I've got 22 really small kids two and four and this is kind of just prompted some thoughts in my mind as to what's an appropriate age to start talking about with your children start talking to your children excuse me about substances and chemicals and you know some of the things that they might be pressured to experiment with in school what is in your mind what's what's an appropriate age to begin that discussion and how do you start that discussion it's not 12 it's not 15 it's when they ask you that can be five that can be any age where they start getting curious about things they see somebody smoking a cigarette you talk to about that you talk to him about that why that person might smoke why that person continues to smoke you tell them the downside of that you talk to him they see all sorts of stuff on TV wherever the chosen you know this glorified sense of what it's like to smoke that's not so much anymore but other things it's Emily drink it drink is a good example I'd like to watch TV and watch cop shows and almost everyone amends with somebody having a drink that sends a real clear message out there when kids see things like that and they ask you as a parent talk to them you don't tell them all the facts the first day you asked you but during their life you need to let them know why we shouldn't smoke marijuana why we shouldn't drink and I don't mean drink as an adult a healthy adult you're allowed to drink you're not allowed to go out and get drunk at a football game on that's not as healthy adults do lots of adults do that lots of parents do that but that's where the example comes back i think in showing your kids what it's like to be a healthy person chemical free person you don't get intoxicated on anything and i think that's critical answer your question that does what are some of the consequences you would you would highlight with your kids about you know the impacts are the the results of getting into chemicals and either from an experimentation level or even to the point of abuse or addiction what are some of those consequences I think the first thing that using abusing chemicals not let me define what that means using means you use a chemical you don't get in toxic you don't get high you walk away from it abuse means you're using a chemical and chemical alcohol drugs doesn't matter abusing chemical means it's causing problems in your life and you keep using it but you finally get to a point where you say I got to get out of this addiction is where you're using it's causing problems in your life and all of a sudden it's controlling your life bottom line consequences our relationships the first thing you hurt when you abuse or addictive chemicals is you you lose relationships next thing is as an adolescent you might start losing friends you start school no longer as a priority if it ever was mine ever was for me but I graduated things in your life that were important are no longer important because when you start abusing chemicals and when you start getting addicted to chemicals those are what's important and the friends that you now have our friends that are using the friends that I used to have that are playing football they're still playing football and you're over here doing this drug I've had thousands the kids over the years and parents tell me why marijuana is okay because it really doesn't hurt me it's a natural drugged all this stuff and what I tell them is it's going to screw over your relationships just as bad if not worse alcohol does and alcohol is the worst drug we have in this nation for relationships it is hurt more families than all the other drugs combined tobacco is the most costly because it kills more people and it causes more physical damage but alcohol messes over relationships so bottom line those are the consequences of it can you give us some perspective on just just ages that you dealt with and maybe some statistics about you know how many kids in middle school or elementary school or even high school are out there experimenting with illegal substances or even addicted to them there's no age that from middle school on app there's noise they're not using nationwide about thirty percent thirty-five percent of our our kids out there are using on some kind of regular basis that might be once a month that might be once a week it might be everyday that's a lot of kids but the other side of that is sixty to seventy percent the kids aren't using at all and that's a real good thing to remember of the hundred percent of the kids I worked on probation only twenty percent we're coming back time and time again the other eighty percent got in trouble they ran into the wall that was called a probation officer he backed off and they changed so about thirty to thirty-five percent of kids middle school high school have either experimented or using on a regular basis yes done an experiment more kids experiment than thirty percent but most most kids the experiment and they stopped the ones I work with and spend all my time with that didn't happen there was a benefit to using they used they got to benefit out of it they felt better they they forgot all learn the problems they were having over here they had new friends they could socialize I drank as a late teenager because that's how I socialized I won't tell you the story about meeting my wife I was going to sounds good I think she's here so I can't do that don't eat during the break and drinking was how I socialized and that's how I kind of got out of the not being able to talk to other human beings a lot of relatives but they didn't count for parents who are kind of navigating that they've got kids in middle school in high school what are some some principles you'd give them about how to kind of identify you know maybe some early signs that their kids are starting to use some substances how do you kind of detect that and how do you open your your children up to some conversations about that the most important thing like I say there's a relationship if you have a relationship and you talking to your kids and your spending time with them you need to recognize when they start talking about using they start talking about well my friend Jimmy was he said they had a party at the house the other night one of my friends said his mother let him use marijuana this weekend when you start hearing things about drugs now coming from because when they ask you about why is it illegal to smoke pot why can't I drink you know you can when they start asking those questions you need to start spending more time talking about those issues if you can do that you're going to spot kids to experiment and who are using every now and then there's a lot of signs of kids who are abusing chemicals they change friends they they start sliding at school they start getting more moody these are all things that adolescents do the crazy thing about adolescence is a crazy the normal thing about that lesson things is they're crazy bottom line there they have a real difficult I mouth life and they're trying to break away from you as parents and that's their job their job is to become independent their job is to move on with life and in that process they have a lot of emotional things that happen in their lives that Pope that allow them to pull away but also it's kind of scary as parents you watched him go through these things and you want to you want to help him through I swore wasn't going to say this but our daughter could talk to us for a significant period of time but she was talking to other healthy adults in the process she was talking to youth leaders she was talking other people we thought that was terrible because she could talking to us it was just who she was we now have as good a relationship as any parent does with her but for us quite a six months of her life she talked to us but it wasn't a very nice tone and I wasn't a very nice parent so it was mutual I learned to parent as I went along we had foster kids we raised three kids as a probe estas and my wife is a teacher there's no magic in what you could do we had dubs and frontwards and backwards and got nothing out of that book I mean it was just do as it's tough being a parent but it's a blessing total blessing being a parent these are some websites that person is kind of cool that's called drug abuse gov family checkup you can actually go on as parents and run through it give us clues about what to look for it gives ways to talk to your kids it gives actual conversations shows you how to do that it was really cool website the hell and youth crisis organization great place to go to if you're starting to have problems with your kids if you don't know what to do let me just ask you this if you're a parent you found yourself in a situation where you know your kid is using or experimenting and you think it's gotten to the point of unhealthy and you as a parent don't know what to do what advice would you give a parent to to help them intervene in that situation number one educate yourself you need to know what you're talking about when you're talking to kids there's thousands always do that on the internet number to go to a professional either mental health counselor or a drug counselor or someone in the field and talk to them about what do I do now there's no mad you can deal with addiction for 8 14 15 years that I did that I educated I didn't change kids I told them the downside of using drugs we just hit red you know I think you took some of our time anyway thanks David thank you you