By Jonathan Woods
Something to wonder about, and to worry about, is whether trends in parenting promote and sustain the ongoing increase in the use of marijuana among adolescent children. Regarding this matter, two trends are of particular concern.
First there is the over-sized role played by adults in childhood. And second, there is the excessive and misguided pressure brought to bear on adolescents regarding the meaning and importance of admission to an elite college.
Those of us born in, or around, the Eisenhower administration recognize how different childhood has become and how, in some ways, it has been degraded. We recognize that children no longer roam the streets and parks anymore, neither in groups nor alone. So children are less likely, and less able, to explore their environment independently, to discover adventure independently, to spontaneously organize games, wreck games, or push themselves beyond what is familiar or safe.
Having far more supervised time than was once common, children have fewer opportunities to struggle among themselves, within themselves or with their environment. As a result children have fewer opportunities to develop an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, i.e. a sense of their own competence. In turn, this interferes with the development of self-confidence, the capacity to more fully and more readily experience engagement and satisfaction. And, similarly, this loss of (unenhanced, unassisted, unsupervised) autonomous experience undermines adolescents’ ability to accept stumbling sometimes, being wounded sometimes, on occasion failing altogether yet pushing on ahead even so.
Taken in conjunction with the use of electronic devices, to fill the gap once filled by imagination, the current inclination to shape so much of children’s time and activities — the inclination to coach and assist children with so much— seems paradoxically to produce young adults who are more wobbly: more hesitant, less sure of themselves and less resilient.
Maybe as an overwrought expression of parental desire to keep children safe, or maybe as a stab at fulfilling unmet childhood fantasies, or simply as a display of powerful commercial forces in action, the adult intrusion into childhood sends an implicit yet strong message that childhood and adolescence should be stripped of uncertainty, turmoil, injustice and pain, thus placing increased pressure on children to fulfill the kindly intended yet burdensome and misguided wish that children “just be happy.”
In this context marijuana use, given its capacity to dull sharp edges, to diminish urgency and conjure out of nowhere a feeling of well-being, may seem to provide adolescent children with an efficient way to comply with the expectations and desires that have shaped the world they inhabit. It may seem that weed offers adolescents a quick and easy way to substantially fulfill parental desires that they “just be happy.”
Similarly, but not identically, there are super-over-programmed youth, some of whom are outstanding achievers and genuinely gifted, scrambling to meet unreasonably high expectations in order to acquire an elite education. These are adolescents, along with young adults, driven to work a lot of their time, in a range of ways, whose output can be ferocious. And while terrific and impressive in many respects, the cost of achieving so much — AP classes, sports, art, community service, etc.— is considerable.
Primarily the cost is paid in the sacrifice of time: time to relax and time to play, time to daydream and time to recover. Also, the cost is paid in the loss of opportunities: opportunities to be frivolous, opportunities to reflect, opportunities to change direction, to start from scratch and to calm down. It is in this context that marijuana use (along with the use of alcohol) provides an easy seeming solution to a tricky seeming problem. Chemically driven, and chronologically compressed, the experience of using marijuana provides an efficient way to relieve tension, enabling one to return to work in pursuit of a credential whose perceived value has risen, over the past ten years, to a level that is astonishing.
Now none of this is to suggest that the enlarging use of marijuana among adolescents is exclusively, or primarily, the result of shifts in parental attitudes (regarding children’s degree of safety and level of comfort, or regarding the level of sacrifice one might accept in pursuit of an elite education). Yet when reflecting upon the decades long shift in marijuana use, from a once-in-a-while, inconsequential seeming habit into something that is often central to one’s functioning and identity, it would be mistaken to ignore the concurrent shift in social beliefs and parental attitudes that inadvertently lead adolescent children to embrace quick and easy comfort.
So what might be done? Admittedly, it is difficult to know (and there is not enough space remaining to adequately answer this question). But here are some possibilities one might consider:
1) In their interactions with children, grownups focusing upon and emphasizing more the value and rewards of adulthood (rather than childhood).
2) Adults making peace with only a limited ability to protect children and managing the resultant anxiety by focusing more on the development of children’s competence through a variety of unpleasant and pleasant experiences over time.
3) Preservation of children’s free time (which might include working with school systems to limit the load any one student can carry at any given moment).
4) Greater acknowledgment, by adults, of the importance, demands and rewards of friendship.
5) Focusing less upon having children scramble and compete for diminishing opportunities and more upon expanding opportunities for everyone.
Jonathan Woods is the Director of Comprehensive Mental Health Services (609-737-7797). Founded in 1988, CMHS combines the personal attention of a private practice with the strength of a larger organization.
The Hopewell Valley Municipal Alliance (HVMA) facilitates coordination and communication between community groups, municipal governments, schools, business and faith communities as we together collaborate to address substance abuse issues and promote healthy youth in Hopewell Valley. Established in 1996, the HVMA acts as the local planning and coordinating body for substance abuse prevention activities on behalf of the Governor’s Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse (GCADA).
