Jessica Lahey, NYT Best Selling Author on The Addiction Inoculation, Inviting Failure and The Ultimate Challenge For Parents
Host: Brenda Zane, brenda@brendazane.com
Guest: Jessica Lahey, author, The Addiction Inoculation & The Gift of Failure on Instagram, @teacherlahey
Free ebook: “HINDSIGHT: 3 Things I Wish I Knew When My Son Was Misusing Drugs, by Brenda Zane. Download here.
Want my weekly email for support during this challenging time? Click here to request it.
Podcast support from:
The Stream and The Woods Communities support this episode. If you’re parenting (or co-parenting) a child who is misusing drugs and alcohol, our communities are a private place where you can find support, education and healing. Learn more here.
episode resources:
Nadine Burke Harris - The Deepest Well
Quiet, Susan Cain
Jessica’s Parent Teacher Conference NYT Column
about this episode:
Jessica Lahey has been surrounded by addiction her whole life. As a person now in long-term recovery, she grew up around alcoholism, came to her own reckoning with dinking, has taught every grade from 6-12, worked with adolescents in residential treatment, and written two New York Times best-selling books, The Gift of Failure and The Addiction Inoculation. In this episode, you’ll hear how Jessica went from being adamantly against substance use to realizing she had a serious drinking problem, why she wants parents to focus on progress, not product, why allowing our kids to struggle truly is a gift, and explains the data behind the mantra, “delay, delay, delay.”
-
[00:00:00] You are in for a huge treat today, my friend. Well, I, um, I think I probably tell you that every week, but for real, the conversation that you're about to hear is one that I believe is so important on so many levels.
I have been semi stocking Jessica Lehe for a while now, since I listened to her book, the Addiction Inoculation last year, and then of course, I had to find her on Instagram and Twitter, and then through the magic that the Universe delivers at times, I don't know how. We actually got connected through a mutual friend, and I asked her if she would be on the podcast, and she said yes.
So I was so excited. Jess, which I guess I get to call her now because that's how she signed her email, is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, the Gift of Failure, how the Best Parents Learn To Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed, and The Addiction Inoculation Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence.
She was awarded the Research Society on Alcohol's Media Award for outstanding journalistic efforts of writers who cover empirical research on alcohol for her book, the Addiction Inoculation, and Advocacy for the Recovery Community. She likes statistics and data as much as I do, and so I think we're a good match in that way.
Over 20 years. Jess has taught [00:01:30] every single grade from sixth to 12 in both public schools, in private schools. She also spent five years teaching in a drug and alcohol rehab for adolescence in Vermont, and she serves as a prevention and recovery coach at Santa, a medical detox and recovery center in STO, Vermont.
Jess has written about education, parenting, and child welfare for the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and her biweekly column. The Parent-Teacher conference ran for three years in the New York Times. She holds the dubious honor of having written an article that was later adapted as a writing prompt for the 2018 s a t, and she co-hosts the hashtag m writing podcast from her empty nest in Vermont.
And by the way, if you are a writer or you want to become a writer, definitely check out her podcast. Hashtag m am writing. We talked about the very hard job of parenting, our own personal flaws about giving up, drinking, about failure, and so much more. I know you just wanna dive in, so let's do it. Here's me and Jess Leahy.
I will meet you on the side.
This is so fun. It's so great. I'm so excited to be here. I'm so, so excited to be here. I listened to your book, the [00:03:00] Addiction Inoculation. I wanna, you know, the whole like last three years is kind of a blur. So I wanna say it was maybe the beginning of 2022. It came out in April of 2021, so, and paperback later, about six months later.
So that's about right. Okay. Yeah. So I was listening to it on my walks during Covid and thinking, man, it actually, what I thought was, I was so sad that I hadn't done the work. Of everything that you talk about in that book. Well, but it's such a tough line because as someone in recovery myself, um, my sober date is, uh, June 7th, 2013.
You can only control what you can control, right? So like, after I got sober, before my parents, so more than anything I wanted, once I was sober to get my parent into recovery, and I, I can't do that. I can write an entire book about, Pushing the statistics, like maybe tipping the scale in our favor in terms of preventing substance use disorder, especially, you know, there's preventing substance use and preventing substance use disorder.
Um, but I, I, there's no guarantees ever. So that's why so much of this book is about, um, things that can help, even if someone does end up having a problem, how we can get them to a place of understanding that they need help sooner. But the last thing I wanna do is, you know, guilt or shame anyone, these are just sort of like, I did the [00:04:30] research, here's what I found.
Um, I just needed a starting place and I feel terrible. I had a, a parent recently whose son died actually, of an overdose. She, uh, texted me through social media and said, I really would love to engage with your content, but I just can't. It just elicits too much pain for me. And some of that is, is guilt and shame, and that's the last thing I wanna do.
So there's sort of this really weird sort of, here's what we can control, here's what we can't, here's how we can shift the odds in our favor in even the tiniest bit, because that's all we're talking about here. Even if I do everything perfectly right, you know, my kids and my sister's kids were born with a genetic predisposition for substance use disorder.
And so, you know, we do what we can do, but so much of this is out of our control. Yeah. Well, and you know, the, the folks that listen to Hope's Dream, I would say probably are already in it with their kids. But what I love about both books, and I really want to talk about the gift of failure, cuz I think that's like the first step is that even if they are experimenting, even if they're, they are in it, there's a lot of what you talk about that still applies.
It's not like, oh, it's too late for you now we've, you know, now you're in a different club. So I love that there's a different book for you. Yes, yes. Um, but I know that you [00:06:00] started out with your personal story and I don't wanna spend too much time there, but I, I do. Mm-hmm. Kind of, you know, I'm curious about why that felt really important to you, especially when you're talking about helping parents with their kids.
Mm-hmm. I think obviously it gives you some street cred. Um, I also quit drinking during C O V I D. Um, A very non exciting story, kind of, you know, like, I've heard you talk about yours, or it's not like I was out, you know, uh, roaming the streets at three in the morning or anything, but just realizing like, this does not feel good in my body.
Yeah. That's what makes me so optimistic about right now though. It's, it's, we're in a place where people. Don't have to raise to some level of diagnosis in the DSM five in order to say, hold on, this just isn't working for me. You know, like I was, I joked recently with someone that, um, one of my favorite things in the world are sour, Haribo gummy bears, and they give me such bad heartburn and they make me feel so awful, and I get a headache.
And so, but I still eat them. And so like there's this risk reward ratio for me. Like, okay, I can't eat them as often as I would like to, but I, you know, there's this whole, I, I think it's okay now for us to say, Hmm, yeah, sugar, alcohol, whatever. It's just not working for me right now. And that's just about my feeling good every day, not about some label or diagnosis or whatever.
Right. Right. And I think that same concept applies to our kids, right? Because. Right now, I [00:07:30] feel like we don't have to wait till our kids get to where minded or where. Mm-hmm. A lot of the parents that I work with, you don't have to get to a fentanyl overdose. You can, like, if you back up, um, I feel like you and your work is, are meeting people upstream.
I'm kind of catching them downstream, you know, as, as they're like, oh gosh, I have a real problem. Um, yeah. And I'm, and I'm glad that, that we do that because I didn't feel like there was a space for parents like me who were in it big time. Right. But I love the fact that there's work being done upstream.
Well, and that's part of the origin story stuff too. I mean, you know, I spent 20 years as a teacher and Yes, I grew up with a parent who's an alcoholic, who also grew up with a parent and blah. But you know, all of that genetic stuff going all the way back. And my husband too. So when we first got together, we.
We were cognizant. I mean, he's a physician, so we were cognizant of the, sort of the higher risk that we were at if we ever had kids. And then when we had kids, we also talked about the fact, you know, both of our parents had issues in their marriage because of the substance use disorder stuff. So both of us had experienced that.
Both of us knew we didn't wanna raise kids in that. And so that's why when it started to become a problem for me, I'm like, oh, divorce is a real possibility for me because we've talked about this as something we will not perpetuate with our children. So I knew I was in big trouble, but that was, you know, also help [00:09:00] me be a lot more secretive.
I was very good at that. Um, but I didn't, I also, you know, I may have grown up with a parent who, with alcohol use disorder, but so that meant that I was afraid of it. I stayed away for it from a, from a very, for a very, very long time. And it wasn't until I was very responsible, very oldest child, perfectionist, all that stuff.
And then, Who also by the way, had anxiety, has anxiety disorder and um, by the time I had kids and was in my, you know, mid thirties and my husband was out there learning how to save people's lives and I was, you know, home with some kids, it was, it just crept up on me. And by the time I hit 43, which is the year I got how I just turned 43 when I got sober.
The comparison game when it comes to substance use is such a dangerous road to go down. Like, right? Yeah. When it comes to, you know, I work in a rehab now and I hear, you know, we have people coming in after DUIs and jail and seizures because they try, you know, all that kind of stuff. Whereas I'm like, you know, I'm very lucky I had a lot of not yets, um, but they were, so many really bad things were right there.
Like, I was not drinking at work. But I had started keeping booze in the car. Um, I was not drinking and driving, but that was only because, you know, no emergencies had come up while I happened to be totally blotto, I was throwing up in my garden at night. You know, they were all just kind of, it was bad. It was [00:10:30] really, really bad.
It was bad enough that for me, when my dad came to me on, um, June 8th, June 7th, uh, 2013 and said, I know what an alcoholic looks like. You're an alcoholic. You need help. I was ready. That was my, I was there and that looks different for everyone. But my origin story in terms of the substance use disorder has a lot to do with working with kids.
I mean, I was a teacher for 20 years. I went to law school in order to work in juvenile courts. I know a lot about the juvenile court system and, and child development and a especially adolescent development. Um, cuz my favorite grades to teach are middle school and high school. So, That's where my thinking was.
It wasn't just, okay, well what about my kids now? Like, are my kids doomed to repeat this gener intergenerational thing? Or and at that point I was teaching at, when I had a year sober, I started teaching in an inpatient rehab for adolescents. I was their English and writing teacher. So my other perspective was how did these kids end up here?
What could we have done differently for them? Um, I had former students, Georgia, who's featured in the book, um, she was a daily drinker, but at the time I became her teacher in high school. So I had a lot of early on in the, in the, in the trajectory reasons to look at what parenting and education best practices, well, and mentoring and coaching best practices should be if we wanna prevent, you know, later on, kids from developing substance use disorder.
And that prevention [00:12:00] starts in pre-K and kindergarten. So, Yes. Much earlier than I think most parents, right? Think right? Yeah. You don't think about having a conversation like that, but what, what does a conversation with somebody that young sound like Because to, to some of us, like that just feels really extreme.
But I know for a fact that that's what needs to happen. It's not about crystal meth or fentanyl or whatever we're talking about essentially the, the very best. Substance use. Uh, prevention programs are essentially social emotional learning programs with public health components and sort of bodily safety, autonomy and refusal skills.
So the nut of those is social emotional learning or SEL programs and those f and life skills programs, that kind of stuff. And those start ideally in pre-K and K and, you know, kindergarten teachers tell us over and over and over again, pro-social skills and developing social emotional learning is way more important at that early age than, um, academics.
So, Given that a lot of the stuff that we're talking about when those kids are really little, my favorite examples are things like, you know, why do we spit out the toothpaste instead of swallowing it? If putting it on inside of our mouth is good, wouldn't swallowing it be better? You can tell I've got this addictive personality where I'm like, if a little is good, wouldn't a lot be better?
Makes total sense. But we have to talk about, well this is a topical thing. I mean topical on top of our teeth, slightly inside of our body. And there are lots of other [00:13:30] things that are only topical that we don't put inside of our body. And here are some examples. Or you know, when they get a little bit older.
You start talking about, you know, the words that are on those prescription bottles and using the tools that we know work developmentally for kids, like pattern recognition and picking out letters and some of the, and learning about things through songs. And we apply those skills to having conversations about why you would never take a medication that has someone else's name on the label.
And that's going to become super important way down the line. Um, you know, 1314, which is the average age of initiation mm-hmm. For misusing, um, a prescription medication. That kind of conversation. You know, parents seem to understand that if kids are gonna misuse prescription pills, it's going to be because they got them in their medicine cabinet or someone else's.
And yet so few parents know about take back days or telling your kids not to, you know, or you know, you keep around that codeine just in case someone throws their back out or whatever. I know. Yeah. Um, and. So all of those things, you know, you have to think back as far as possible and think, well, how am I gonna get those conversations started in a way that's comfortable for me?
And that usually means starting not with illegal drugs, but with, you know, what keeps us safe and healthy, and how do we protect ourselves and how do we advocate for ourselves and how do we tell people when something doesn't make them feel right? All of those things are a really important [00:15:00] part of this picture and lead into refusal skills later on.
Right? Because if you're starting that conversation like that where it's just part of the conversation and here are things that make sense and don't, then it doesn't become the what, what I faced, which was, oh gosh, we've never talked about this. Yeah, yeah. And now I see my kid. Well, I didn't even see him.
Like all of a sudden he disappeared, right? For a week. And I was like, oh, I think we have a problem. Then it becomes like a really awkward conversation, right? And now you act well and you're not alone. Okay, good. You're not alone. Only 10 per, only 10% of parents admit that they talk to their kids ever about misusing prescription drugs.
So that's a big problem. Even though 67% of them say that they know that they're probably coming from a known source like your cabinet or someone else's cabinet. So that's a bit of a a, you know, we always think, well, I'll get to that. Or, you know, they're so young, they're so innocent, blah, blah, blah. And those conversations are hard.
They're hard face to face. They're easier side by side walks. Uh, you know, I joke about chairlifts are really great riding in cars, although I remember very specifically feeling so trapped, having those conversations with my mother, um, about sex and, you know, but. I, the thing about these conversations, just like the sex conversations, is it's not one conversation.
And the more conver times you have this conversation, the easier it becomes. You know, my daughter, um, joked, [00:16:30] uh, when she was a freshman in high school, she said, her biology teacher said, you know, just, let's just take a poll. You know, how many parents had talked to their kid, talked to you guys about, um, about drugs and alcohol.
And my daughter just laughed. And she's like, when doesn't, when don't they talk to me about it? Because it's such a normal conversation in our house. We had it a couple of days ago. So, and it just comes up as part of a regular. You know, here's what I'm thinking about. So I'm the kind of person where like the sex conversation is still uncomfortable for me, but that's because that's not my wheelhouse.
Um, I haven't made it my wheelhouse if I choose to make it my wheelhouse. I'm sure those conversations would get easier, but, well, you picked a, you picked a big wheelhouse, so I think you can, you can let that, you could leave this sex one for someone else. My husband, actually, my husband has done most of the sex conversations, which has been great.
Um, we sort of divide and conquer.
Hi, I'm taking a quick break because I wanna let you know about the private online community I created and host. For moms who have kids misusing drugs or alcohol, it's where I hang out between the episodes, so I wanted to share a little bit about it. This place is called This Stream, and it isn't a Facebook group.
It's completely private away from all social media sites where you start to take care of yourself because through all of [00:18:00] this, who is taking care of you, the Stream is a place where we teach the craft approach and skills to help you have better conversations and relationships, and we help you get as physically, mentally, and spiritually healthy as possible so that you can be even stronger for your son or daughter.
You can join us free for two weeks to see if it's the right kind of support for you and learn more about all the benefits that you get as a member@thestreamcommunity.com, and I'll see you there. Now let's get back to the conversation.
You know, there I say all the time with the gift of failure that one of the most important things we can do to really connect with our kids and stay connected is to love the kids we have and not the kids we wish we had. And that, you know, this is a, an ever who our kids are is an ever moving target. And so when we're thinking about, you know, how we're gonna talk to them, whether it's about sex or whether it's about drugs and alcohol, that changes over time.
You know, either because they're developmentally changing or because they're in different head space. It's, it's a moving target all the time. And we have to be really flexible. Yeah. Well that requires you to be so nimble and so, um, just willing to learn. And I've done a lot of that too, just. You know, being willing to learn.
And where I think the, where, where I love the tie between the gift of failure and the addiction culation, [00:19:30] is that if you're starting with those difficult conversations and you're starting with the difficulty of letting them fail early, then it d it's not so hard to do that as they're getting older. Um, but a lot of what we see with our parents that we work with is this constant rescuing, right, of, okay, well my kid was super drunk last night, can't get to practice this morning, so I'm gonna call the coach and let them know that he had a dentist appointment or whatever.
Right? There's just so much of this ongoing rescue, rescue, rescue that. Because of the substance use in particular, um, happens a lot. I tend to talk about the getting to a place where, you know, you need help as being like a 100 piece puzzle and you know, you hardly ever get to be like, piece 100 and the person is like, oh, that's right, I'm ready.
It's, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm, anyway. Um, but some of the last pieces of my puzzle in the last couple years, I'd say like pieces 80 through 85 were having to go to work for at a middle school, so hungover, uh, it was torture. That was really good for me to have to experience that. And frankly, if I had gotten in trouble for that, that may have even pushed me.
I just was really good for at covering things if I got in trouble for that, um, or someone had noticed and said something to me that would've pushed me even further along the road. Um, what's so fascinating about the topic that you've just brought up is when I work. When I worked at the rehab, and the only reason I don't still work there, [00:21:00] cause I loved that job, was that they stopped treating adolescents at this rehab.
So they just didn't need the school anymore. Is that the kids? I have seen with the lowest feeling sense of self-efficacy, which is the, the feeling like you can take action ch and change your, the way your world is working. Um, the way your day is happening, the way things are happening in your family, the way the world works.
You know, if we get to a really grand scale, kids with the lowest levels of self-efficacy are, in my experience, having worked with lots of these kids and having taught, you know, hundreds and hundreds and spoken to thousands and thousands are the kids who have. No ability to change what's going on around them because they are in foster care group homes in a, an abusive situation, um, where no matter what they do, they can't change their environment.
And these are the kids that I've, I've written about some of them where one was like, look, why bother, you know, all of the men in my family go to prison. Uh, everyone around me believes I'm going to prison. So that's, That's the trajectory right there. That's a kid with really low sense of self-efficacy.
The other kids with incredibly low sense of self-efficacy are the kids who are over parented to death. And, oh, I don't like to tend the word, use the word over parenting. I tend to use the word directive or controlling. Um, and those parents who are constantly managing, directing, um, snowplow, whatever the, the term is, those kids also don't feel like they have any control or [00:22:30] sense of autonomy or ability to change outcomes.
And in fact, so Julie Lithco Hayes, a friend of mine who wrote the book, how to Raise an Adult, and she was a freshman dean at Stanford, she said, you know, these kids, the best and the brightest kids would come into my office and. I would ask them about, you know, they would ask me a problem about problem solving or issue they're having with their roommate or whatever.
And I would look at them and I'd say, well, you know, what do you wanna learn? Or what are you gonna do about that problem? And they just had this blank deer in the headlights expression, and she refers to that as having existential impotence. Like, they don't know who they are, they don't know how to manage their lives.
They have no sense of self-efficacy. So there's, it's, it's true that kids with really low sense of self-efficacy just don't have any way to, to feel like, uh, uh, because one of the best ways to get a nice, uh, hit a dopamine in your brain is to become competent at something and solve a problem. Um, and see if, if you're never able to do that because you're being held back either because of neglect or over parenting, those are the kids that I really, really worry about.
That's so interesting that the, it's the, almost the extremes, right? It's the Yep. The kids who really are in such a, a desperate place, um, from a lack. I, I've talked about this before. It's, it's crazy to admit, but I was paying my child to go to school. I would pay him $5 a day if he would just go to school because I was so, and this was all about [00:24:00] me.
Right. I was so tired of getting that robo call from the attendance office. Right. Desperate measures, desperate times. I totally get it. I totally get it. And it worked. It worked for five days exactly. Mm-hmm. Five days. Yeah. And then it stopped, right? Because that just doesn't work. But man, I was just, and, and now at the other end of this I can see that that was so about me.
It was just like, I need you to go to school so that I feel better because I'm tired of getting the call. I'm tired of showing up at the high school and having the staff look at me like, yeah, the research, I mean, in gift of failure, I talk extensively about this. You know, the research on that is so clear that extrinsic motivators work really, really well in the short term or as a one off, that kind of thing as a novelty.
But they do not work over the long term. And you know, my joke is, if you want your kid to not want to learn math, pay them for their math grades. And you know, this isn't me. This is Edward DC and Dan Pink and lots of other people who, you know, write and talk about human motivation. It's, we know this, we have 60 years of really good research on this, but at the same time, Those are the tools we have.
You know, I would hold the, the, the stuffed, the favorite stuffed animal hostage on top of the refrigerator, or I would use sticker charts to try to get my kids to do something, or I would pay the, you know, paying for grades is a really common thing and um, you know, that doesn't work. It just doesn't work, period.
It's so [00:25:30] painful to watch. And that's why I think the more we can, I think your next book needs to be like the inoculation of parents to the discomfort of being a really good parent. And it is, well, it is really, really uncomfortable. And I have to say, as someone who. Is really good at talking the talk and is totally willing to acknowledge how hard it is to walk the walk.
In fact, I wrote an essay for, uh, grown and flown about how badly I screwed up when we were doing college ca, college tours, and how I let myself become a part of that, um, you know, all of the times. And my kids will call me on it. The kids absolutely will call me on it. My solution to that is two things.
Number one, do I want my kid to do this perfectly right this second, or do I want them to be able to do it themselves eventually or next time? Hmm. That's just an important thing for me as a human also, as something I learned that was really important in teaching is, you know, this how our parenting, our teaching has to be about more about the process than it is about the end product.
Whether the end product is a trophy, a grade looking perfect, uh, a college acceptance. We can't operate day-to-day, all focused on that end product. It's just, it doesn't work in terms of cognitive, the way kids brains work. And it also, It just messes with them believing us when we say, you know, as long as you learn something from [00:27:00] this mistake, failure, whatever, this experience, then it's still valuable.
When we're actually saying to them, no, but what I really care about is that you bring that a home, or that you bring that trophy home or that whatever. And I think, you know, when it comes to kids in recovery, that ha, we have to be process oriented because. Young people in recovery are so much more likely to relapse.
They're so much more likely to screw up their executive function skills stink because their brain is not done developing till the early to mid twenties. And PS if you start using drugs and alcohol early in order to manage your emotions, in order to have a coping mechanism that's not like actually mindfulness and dealing with the actual emotion, then your coping mechanisms stink and, and you're stunted in that way too.
So understanding that adolescents, that recovery in adolescence is just a different beast than recovery in adulthood is gonna get us a really long way, I think to focusing more on the process and less on the end product. I think it's so important, and that's like a mantra I have to use almost every day.
The, the parents that are listening, if you're, even if your kid's just experimenting, they're not dependent, they're not addicted. The tendency is just to focus a hundred percent like you just said, on the product of. Sobriety, like the product of Right, you will never use substances. And, and we just go straight to the end instead of, well, what does today look like?
What does tomorrow look like? What are we gonna learn from this experience? Right. Yeah. What's [00:28:30] might, what might have been a better way to manage those really big emotions? We gotta get into that sort of whole dance gold, Tina Payne, Bryson, name it to tame it. You know, being able to talk about emotions in order to be and name them in order to deal with them.
Um, it's so important and I think that it also starts with us. I mean, you know, we can talk and talk and talk all we want, but if we're not modeling that as well, like whether it's gift of failure, you know, my kids seeing me, um, have goals for something that is a little bit scary for me, then they're never gonna.
Believe me or act when I say you really need to stretch yourself and try things that are outside of your comfort zone, why would they do that if they're not seeing me do it? Um, and but back to your point about sobriety being this binary yes or no kind of thing, um, I, there's an example that came out of, my husband grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah.
And when he was growing up, there was a thing that they would say to the girls that was horrible. But it's so much like this, which is if you are not a virgin, then you're like a chewed up piece of gum. No one's gonna wanna chew that piece of gum. You're used up who's gonna wanna chew on a used up piece of gum?
It's this whole toxic purity culture thing they do to girls, right? But we tend to think in terms of, oh, well they, they've tried alcohol. That's it, it's all over, you know, it's, it's done. Now I'm just in, you know, trying to do cleanup mode and that's not. That's not the case at all. It's all about what did you [00:30:00] learn from this?
How are we gonna operate differently next time? Um, you know, why did you drink? What was, you know, let's not talk about. The punishment right. Now, let's talk about what it was that made you feel like you needed to pick that up. Was it just curiosity or were you really feeling If you're like me, anxious and having social anxiety and having, um, you know, imposter syndrome, teaching them ways to, to deal with that stuff without having to pick up is, is an important part of the process.
And they are not gonna talk to us if all we're, um, focused on is the retribution the punishment for them doing stuff wrong? Absolutely. 100%. There need to be consequences and hopefully they're natural consequences, things that actually flow from screwing up. Like, you know, if you have a hangover and you have lacrosse, you better be sending them to lacrosse practice.
You better send them to that French test. You better, you know, I don't care. Send them to that s a t, you know, you can always take another one. All those things. Are gonna be number one important pieces of their puzzle when they're, if they ever get into trouble and need to ask for help. Um, and it's gonna be a really important part of figuring out what to leave behind and what to take forward with us that worked to the next iteration of this, because we're gonna, they're so many opportunities for learning, we're just gonna be running up against the next one.
If we didn't learn anything from that last one, we're doomed to repeat it. Absolutely. And there's just this [00:31:30] tacit understanding that our kids' success. Is a reflection of our success as a parent. So when we think about sending your kid to the s a t or to work or whatever, hungover, incapable, what we do is we play that movie forward in our head and we go, well wait a minute.
If we, if I do that, then they're not gonna do well in the s a t, which means they're not gonna get into this college, which means they're not gonna get this job. And we are like, we should be screenwriters because within five minutes we've already written our child's entire life. Mm-hmm. I mean, I myself, like, started vomiting horribly in the middle of my SATs because I had eaten so much candy the night before my friend and you know, my, of course nobody knew that.
My mom didn't know that. And so my mom could have been like, oh no, she ate so much candy, she's gonna get sick. She can't go to the s a t. Right. And it's like, you put, you just, you like fast forward and I think that. Um, to not do that and say, Hey, but, but we can only do that if we are not tied to, if we're not tying our success as a parent to their success as a child.
Right? And I think that's what our culture has done. Let me reframe your exact example. One of my favorite people on the planet. I, someone I just respect so much as a parent. She had three girl has three girls, the oldest, every single Easter, [00:33:00] just wanted to eat all the candy all at once. Or maybe it was Halloween, I can't remember.
I think it was Halloween. And finally she said, fine, eat it all. See what happens. And she did, and she was sick everywhere. It was, she felt awful. She threw up everywhere. It became like the family lore. And not only did the kid probably not do that again, but like the sisters heard the story. My kids have heard the story.
Everyone's heard the story, and it's become, It's become an object lesson in, you know, oh, there are consequences to, like, I'm not saying it because I'm the parent and I'm, I'm saying it just because I, I ne I need to follow these rules that make me look like a good parent. There's some actual information, and that's why I think the addiction inoculation was, I'm, I loved writing the Gift of Failure.
It was my first book. I'm very proud of it. It's my baby, blah, blah, blah. But the addiction inoculation was really sort of the book I was born to write because it, for me made sense of so many. Things that happened to me as a child. So many experiences that I couldn't make sense of and help me make sense of the research that's out there so that I wasn't operating from a place of magical thinking or myths.
Um, you know, like the whole, oh, I wanna raise my kid like that mythological European kid, so therefore I'm gonna let my kid have sips at home. That just doesn't work. In fact, it does ex the exact opposite. And PS Europe has the highest rate of [00:34:30] alcohol consumption in the world, and the highest rate of death and illness attributable to that alcohol consumption.
So, and what's fascinating about that, Is that right there is where I lose so many parents. Like of all the pushback that I could get on all the things I talk about, that's where I get the biggest pushback. Um, I make these daily videos for Instagram on, on TikTok, on substance use disorder prevention. And when I talked about the myth of the European moderate drinker and raising kids to be like them, I had to make six follow up videos because of all of the irate people coming at me saying, you know, naming countries that are exceptions.
And what's fascinating is that actually drives home the point because the countries that are exceptions to that, and by the way, the statements I just made come from the World Health Organization, um, from their report on Europe and the European region and the European Union. But the countries that are exceptions are exceptions because their community standards don't tolerate excessive public intoxication.
They tend to be Southern Europe and it's just not. Accepted there. It's part of the culture to not get outta control drunk. Whereas if you go to other countries in the European Union where there isn't that social stigma against public, against getting really, really intoxicated, their rates of public intoxication and drinking tend to be higher.
So, you know, it's really interesting to me. We are [00:36:00] so invested in these myths, either because we engaged in them ourselves, which I did, and I admit to that in the book. I love that your son got his first taste. Yeah. Yeah. That was great. Well, it's, yeah. I'm glad that you brought this particular subject up and I'd like to dive into it a little bit more because oddly, I am having this exact issue at home.
My husband is Italian. Mm-hmm. From Northern Italy. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, wine flows through our veins, not blood. Right. So, and Italy in particular, by the way, just so you know, while they have one of the highest rates, they're in the top five for daily drinking, they're in one of the lowest categories for per capita consumption.
So they're drinking very little at each instance. So Italy, Greece, and a couple of other countries are exceptions. Uh, Spain is not an exception, by the way. So now you're in this dangerous territory of exception hood. But the other part of that is the delay, delay, delay. So yes, maybe small amounts, you know, like I think in Italy it's like five ounce, four or five ounces with each meal is, is kind of typical.
But what concerns me and where, where we are having the, the battle is he's 17. Why are we doing this at 17? Delay delay. Delay is important for two reasons. Number one, the younger a kid is when they have their first taste of [00:37:30] drugs or alcohol, the higher their lifelong risk of having, of developing substance use disorder is.
And yes, there are some statistical intricacies here that I'd be happy to go into if this was a show about statistical, um, analysis. Um, I happen to be married to a statistician. I happen to be the parent of a statistician, so I get it all the time. Okay? So if a kid is in eighth grade when they first try, drugs and alcohol, or alcohol, which by the way, the average age of, um, initiation, if a kid is going to try alcohol in this country is around 13.5 13.
13.7, right? So, If a kid is in eighth grade or around 13 when they first try drugs and alcohol, they have around a, a little bit less than a 50% lifelong chance of developing substance use disorder. If they start, when they're in 10th grade, it's, it's halved half of that. Um, it's around 21%, 21 to 27 depending on the, what you look at.
And then if you, um, are able to delay until 18, we can get it down to sort of where it is in the general population or around 10%, 11%. Um, so there's the, that's statistical reason right there. That's amazing. Yeah, it's massive. And the reason I say there are statistical anomalies, there is, you can imagine kids whose parents drink a ton would have more alcohol around.
It's more, it's, you know, ubiquitous. It's available, it's [00:39:00] probably not locked up. And so therefore they would be more able to try alcohol very young and families. Where there's no drinking at all, there's less opportunity. So there is that confounder. But what we know is the younger kid is when they first tried drugs and alcohol, the lower, the higher, their lifelong risk of substance use disorder.
God knows what it is for my poor child when I put it on his tongue, when he was, um, like a week old. But at least it was good wine. It was a really good bottle of wine. And then on top of that, The reason there are chapters in both the Gift of Failure and the Addiction inoculation about adolescent brain development is not just because I think it is one of the most fascinating topics you can learn about, but because adolescent drug and alcohol use is different from adult drug and alcohol use, the brain continues to develop until the early twenties, mid early to mid twenties.
Things that can be moderate to low risk in an adult brain can be moderate to high risk in a adolescent brain. There are things that need to happen unimpeded in the brain from a neurotransmitter perspective, from a synaptogenesis perspective, all from a myelination perspective. Some of those things can't.
Happen the way they're supposed to happen, if they're interrupted or messed with, and that, uh, that involves even messing with the dopamine cycle. I mean, Anna Lem, key's book, dopamine Nation, is an essential read, I think for everybody, not [00:40:30] just for people who are trying to, you know, prevent substance use in their kids.
It's, it taught me so much about how my brain works and. Got me doing cold plunges, by the way, because, you know, the way the brain works, the way the do, and this is important knowledge, actually, the dopamine cycle anky describes this so beautifully. The brain craves homeostasis, a nice level dopamine, you know, situation when we tip dopamine in, in the direction of pleasure, especially when we use something like alcohol or a drug in order to artificially blast that dopamine into the brain.
Um, we tip it in the, on the pleasure side, and then we have what Anna Leki calls the dopamine gremlins, which are the gremlins, so desperate to reestablish homeostasis, but are really bad and tend to overshoot. They're bad at, at like equalizing. They're, they're really good at, at getting the things moving in the opposite directions, but they tend to overshoot.
So then what happens is, is they dopamine gremlins run over to the other side of the, um, scale and they overshoot in terms of pain, which is why when someone. Comes down off of drugs or Read Never Enough by Judith Grisel. That's another book that talks about the ae, um, the A phase and the B phase of, of, uh, drug use.
You know, you have this up and then you have a low that's gonna go lower than where you started, and that includes with dopamine. And dopamine is not just about pleasure, dopamine, you know, we tend to think about dopamine as like the thing that [00:42:00] makes you happy. That's not what it is. It's also about, or I should say, not just what it is, it's also about.
Drive. It's, it's human motivation. It is the thing that helps us get out of bed in the morning and go on with our lives without, with really, really low dopamine levels. It, you just wanna lay there and do nothing. Nothing seems worth it. And so understanding that, um, you know, I was talking about the cold plunge thing.
The reason I cold plunge is it tips the dopamine, um, in the pain direction. Like I pay for the pain up front so I can have this lovely even burst of dopamine throughout the day. It makes me feel great. As much as I hate getting in that water, I hate it. I loathe it. It takes everything I have to do it. But I feel so good afterwards, and it really does give me a nice dopamine hit throughout the day.
Frankly, I did it at first just because I didn't think I could, and that made me mad. So it's a, so I, I highly recommend both. Judith Elle's book. She's a neuroscientist, and Anna Lemke is a, neuroscience is a addiction specialist and dopamine specialist at Stanford. Both really, um, fantastic writers and scientists.
Yes. Well, and Anna Lemke was on a podcast, um, about a year ago. I don't know, I don't remember the, the episode number, but I'll stick it in the show notes. But I'd never heard of, never enough. So I'm very curious to hear about that. It's really, really good. It's sim similar idea [00:43:30] from a slightly different perspective.
It's really great. I would love to, you mentioned working in the adolescent teaching in the school, the adolescent mm-hmm. Program. Mm-hmm. I would love for you to take us and be a little bit of a fly on the wall, what that was like, and, and kind of what you learned from, from those kids. I. So you can get, um, I've written about it a little bit.
It's in addiction inoculation. It's in an essay in a book called, um, on Being 40 ish that I wrote when I, that I was, gave an essay to when I was in my forties. And then there's, gives me an essay in creative non-fiction called, I've Taught Monsters And the Kids Aren't the Monsters. It's, um, a play on words for Stephen King happens to be in recovery also.
And he talks about the fact that he, a lot of the monsters that he wrote were his subconscious self trying to come out his, his addiction coming out in the form of monsters. You know, Annie Wilkes, the nurse in misery was opiates and the Tommy Knockers were cocaine. And so he talks about these monsters coming out.
And so that was an exercise I used to do with my students all the time, which was to imagine their, um, their addiction as a monster. And we would write really descriptive essays about it. And then taking a nod from Joseph Campbell and his work on the Hero's Journey, we would, their addiction monster always had to have some small flaw, some fatal flaw.
And I would liken it to like the [00:45:00] dragon in the Hobbit. He had one scale missing and that's where the arrow was able to go in and pierce his heart. So the, um, the only way it could be defeated was through, you know, this one small flaw. And so they would envision their, um, addiction as a monster, and then we would envision how they could defeat it given its flaw.
And what's tricky about it is, you know, confidentiality and, you know, people have to be not recognizable and all that sort of stuff. But as I mentioned, we had a really interesting mix and it depends on where you are. There are very few inpatient facilities for adolescents, um, even fewer that are good. Um, it's the reason that where I work now, my entire salary goes into a scholarship for young people, 18 to 25 who can't afford to go to really good quality inpatient medical detox and recovery because it's just not available.
That's beautiful. So these kids, a lot of them were in the foster care system. A lot of them had had massive trauma from group homes, neglect, abuse, all that sort of stuff. You know, we had kids as young as we had one who had just turned 13. Um, you know, we've had kids who come into us and our first order of business is they've never had glasses and they need glasses or they've never had any dentistry in their teeth are falling out, you know, that kind of stuff.
The stuff you would kind of. That a lot of people's minds would go to and say, oh yeah, that's who gets addicted. On the other hand, we also had a lot of kids from super hoy toy private schools. Yes. Who [00:46:30] just had no sense of self-efficacy. Were overwhelmed, were anxious. Um, you know, we see a lot of girls with anxiety, you know, women, actually women who drink in order to deal with their anxiety are gonna be more likely to have, uh, alcohol use disorder than not.
So, and that's why I drank was alcohol was anxiety. A lot of kids who, um, have adverse childhood experiences or trauma that we would like to believe don't happen in those happy wealthy households, but absolutely 100% do. And as you may know, the higher your adverse childhood experiences score, whether that's based on the cdc, Kaiser Permanente list or as beautifully articulated in, uh, Nadine Burke Harris's the deepest.
Well, we have to understand that the cdc C'S list is not all inclusive. That there are lots of things that should be on that list, like systemic racism and possibly adoption and lots of other things that Nadine Burke Harris articulates in her book. Um, all of those things happen. We don't get to opt out of those if we have money or if we have social prominence.
That's not the case. And. So I think it's really important to realize that, as you mentioned, the extreme neglect, abuse, all that sort of stuff, low sense of self-efficacy is the mirror image of extreme wealth and privilege. And you know, my favorite kids to teach are kids that no one else wants to teach.
I'm [00:48:00] really, either because they're misunderstood or no one is operating from a trauma informed place in terms of their teaching. You know, they wanna just punish the kids rather than asking why the kid is acting out in class. I got to tour a school recently for kids who have behavioral issues and really have just not.
It's really a school for kids who have just not been able to make it in mainstream classroom. And I remember I was listening to this teacher, Ask this one visiting student, oh, do you like school? And she's like, no, I hate school. But I love learning. Those are the kids that I would give anything to spend all of my time around, because those kids are the most interesting to me.
And they're unfortunately the ones that tend to fall through the cracks. And they also, as you mentioned, this is anecdotal, they're not all brilliant, but lots of them are very, um, have very high sensitivity, empathy, very creative, very, just think in a way that's different. They are, quote, differently wired.
I would highly recommend a book called Differently Wired by Deborah Reber. Um, she has a website also called Tilt Parenting, but her expertise is in parenting and educated kids who are differently wired. And those kids, they just fall through the cracks on a regular basis, which drives me bananas because.
As we know from, you know, even in Adam Grant's originals, he talks about these kids as being the ones who have the, the potential to save [00:49:30] the world because they don't absolutely think like everybody else, they are innovators. They are the kind of person who will think about the solution to the problem that no one else has thought of.
But they're more challenging to teach because they don't fall into our nice little rows and boxes. And, you know, there's all kinds of reasons that you have to be super flexible. And that doesn't make me weak as a teacher or their pawn. It makes me a more effective teacher because I have to teach the kids I have not the kids I wish I had.
And I think that that was what you mentioned, um, in the book, is that when you talk to kids, what they, what they really want is like mom and dad or caregiver, auntie, whoever's raising you, see me, see me for who I am. Not the poster child that you wish that you had. And I was super guilty of that. Um, having one of these special kids who does not fit into the public school system, does not, you know, he was the kid who would do absolutely nothing, not turn in any work and get an A on the test and they would fail him in the class and he would go bananas cuz it's like, but mom, I know it.
I understand it, I get it. So, um, it is super challenging and when we as parents are so busy and we're frazzled and we're overworked and we're overthinking and we're worried about the economy, like we're all out [00:51:00] here to slow ourselves down and to focus ourselves on and recognize a kid like that who isn't.
The same. And like for me, he was my oldest. It was like, well, I don't know any different. Like maybe this is just how kids are, right? Like, yeah, I don't know. Well, and as teachers, you know, as teachers we tend to teach the way we were taught. We tend to thank goodness for people. Like, for example, Susan Kane, you know, I got to do some, um, I wrote an article, uh, she wrote this book, quiet about.
Quiet kid, being a quiet person. And introverts and I, I'm an extrovert, so I tend to, well, and increasingly as I get older, more and more of an introvert, but I tend to teach to the introverts. And so class participation to me look like kids raising their hand and offering their opinions and blah, blah, blah.
And Susan really helped me see that I was ignoring a huge faction of my students. And that was my fault. I did that. You know, and shame and guilt has no place in any of this because it just blinds us to the realities that we need to see. And if we feel all this shame and guilt, we tend to get into this place of, well, why even bother helplessness kind of thing.
But if we're in constantly in a place of just trying to learn how to be better, Then we're so ahead of the game. The fact that anyone would go read a book like The Gift of Failure or the Addiction inoculation automatically means you're just trying to do better and that's what's [00:52:30] most important. Yeah, that's, that is true.
You're sort of self-selecting into this group of parents who are saying, okay, at least I'm gonna try to understand this. Yeah. Well, and that the problem with my school visits is I constantly hear, oh man, I wish these parents had come to your Gift of Failure event. But it's never, it's never the parent.
The only hope that I can have is that one of the gifts of the pandemic has been more, I do more and more virtual events, which means that sometimes the video's available after the fact for people who have registered, and so, Maybe word of mouth gets around and people hear, oh, she's funny. Oh, she helped me hear something that was really hard for me to hear.
Oh, she didn't guilt or shame me. She didn't lecture us. Like, I want my reputation to precede me as the kind of speaker who makes it easier to hear hard things. And that's actually been my job as a writer. You know, I wrote a column for three years at the New York Times called the Parent-Teacher Conference about the things that teachers wanna tell parents that parents don't wanna hear, and the things that parents wanna tell teachers that teachers don't wanna hear, and how we resolve all of that.
So I, I like this job telling people hard things and, you know, I can't keep people listening unless I'm able to, you know, get them to hear me in the first place. And so there's a certain amount of humor that has to go into that. Well, yeah, humor and humility. I think you do a really good job of that, of saying, yeah, [00:54:00] I know some stuff and I love, I'm also kind of a statistics nerd, so I love all of your, the, the work that you put in, which is significant into the research and the data, because that is so important in today's day when everybody on Instagram is an expert.
Right that, and they have no expertise at all. So I appreciate that, but also just the humility to say, Hey, I struggle with this stuff too. My family struggles with this stuff. You know, I'm an open book. So I think everybody, everybody knows that. Like, clearly my family struggled with it. Um, a lot, a lot, a lot.
And we still do. But yesterday it was funny, my son, my other son who lives with me, he's 23, came in at eight o'clock in the morning and I was. You know, taking notes on a video on high potency thc, and he's like, I love that. I walk in and my mom is like, wa watching videos about marijuana. And I'm like, Hey, you know, that's just what we do in our family.
Yeah. I always think my, my Google search would be interesting, you know, oh my god, on my Google searches, if someone were to like search my computer, some of my Google searches. And between that and the fact that I'm currently writing a fiction thriller, there are some wacky Google searches, uh, in my computer that, you know, I hope no one ever misconstrues because it either looks like I'm trying to kill someone, or you know, what?
Drugs are not detectable in the blah, blah, blah, blah, you know? Right. So, oh my gosh, that's funny. Like, don't arrest me before I have a chance to explain my next book. [00:55:30] Exactly. For a parent who's listening, I'm imagining they're probably, they've dipped a toe into the world of having a kid who they either suspect is.
Starting to, you know, dabble with substances or maybe is already really struggling, maybe their kids in the, you know, sitting in a school like you used to teach, what words would you have for them? Process over product, man, I mean, that daily, you know, in recovery we talk a lot about doing the next right thing for me, you know, I, I was very honest recently at the rehab, I was over teaching and, um, and I said to them when everyone walked into the room that I, they were there helping me that day.
That was one of those days where like at the end of winter in northern Vermont, things were getting kind of dark. I, I noticed I was starting to isolate more. I was starting to look for ways out of feeling my feelings. And so for me, that's a signal that I'm headed into relapse territory. Yeah. And.
Connecting with all these other people in recovery is one of the most important things I could do. And so there are days where I'm literally like, okay, for the next hour I just need to do the right things. And that's all about process. You know, hopefully I get to the end of the day and I get to say, okay, there's another day in the books where I, I didn't drink, but that's one day.
So, you know, for me it's got to, for parenting, for teaching, all of it is [00:57:00] about, okay, I don't care so much about whether or not I look perf perfect in this emergency situation, but what are the long-term goals I have for what I learned from this, or what my kid learns from this, or what my student learns from this.
I have someone who goes and speaks with me yet, but the rehab every once in a while and she relapsed during covid and we have all these conversations about noticing the signs. The, she was, she was in her relapse brain for a long time before she ever actually picked up the drink. And so all of our conversations tend to be about, here's what I have learned from these relapses.
And you know, there's this friend of mine that texts me every once in a while, every time he relapses, which is, has been a lot. And I'm like, okay, what'd we learn this time? What squirrely brain thing? What trigger what, whatever. What is it that you're gonna keep an eye out for next time so that this may not, so we can lower the chances of this repeating.
It has to be constantly about process over product. Our kids are not wrecked. All of this has to be about how we're in it with them moment to moment, and supporting them where they are, not for where, you know, we hope they're gonna end up someday. Mm. Beautiful. Well, I would say that's a perfect way to send people off with some good things to think about how they're gonna have that conversation maybe tonight with a kiddo who comes home under the influence or, well, hopefully you're not gonna have the conversation when they're under the influence or Exactly.[00:58:30]
Or when your kindergartner comes home and you're brushing your teeth tonight, that's the perfect opportunity for an opening to talk about, you know, what goes inside of our bodies and what goes outside of our bodies. And whether it's a tide pod or a toothpaste or a whatever, you know, feeling like you can talk to your kid about that stuff will get us to a place where we can talk about the harder stuff.
Yes. Well, here's to hard conversations. Thank you so much for the work that you do. If they're so, parents turn, ask me constantly where to turn when they're worried their kid has a problem and. There's, there's a lot of prevention stuff out there, but there's not a ton for parents. And, you know, there's lots of books I re I recommend in lots of podcasts I recommend, but I'm always so grateful to have any list to hand to, uh, to parents.
So thank you for being in this space Yeah. And talking about it. Absolutely. It's not the sexiest space I run the club for that nobody wants to be a part of. Right. And it's like, everybody's like, how do I there? It's like, if you don't ever wanna have to need my services, just read Jessica's books, like that's my best recommendation and then you won't have to become part of my club.
Um, but if you are in my club, then we try to make it the best place that we can make it. And to let parents know like, you're an amazing parent. The parents that we work with, and I'm sure you have seen this too, the parents that we work with are so amazing. We, [01:00:00] we talk about like, put your cape on Sister because you do things.
That are harder than any other parent has to do. You know, we had a mom get on a call a couple weeks ago and she was like, yeah, well I gave my daughter Narcan last night. What'd you do? You know? I was like, these are the things that we're dealing with. And so anyway, it's um, it's an interesting job, which I never would've ever imagined myself doing.
But parenting looks a little different than I envisioned it too. I mean, let alone the fact that, you know, my kids have turned out very differently than I ever imagined they would. But that's good cuz that means that they're their own people and not some, I'm, they're not my redo. They're not my do-over.
So, yeah. So important. So important. Well, thank you. A million times over. Can't wait to get this out to folks. I'm gonna, I wrote down all the books that you mentioned, so I'm gonna put those in the show notes as well. There's actually, if you go to jessica leahy.com under speaking, there's a button that says Download speaking bibliography, and it is sort of a constantly updated list of just all my favorite stuff as it comes out.
Okay. That is it for today. If you would like to get the show notes for this episode, you can go to brenda zane.com/podcast. All of the episodes are listed there, and you can also find curated playlists there, so that's very helpful. You might also wanna download a free ebook I wrote, it's called Hindsight.
Three Things I Wish I Knew When My Son [01:01:30] Was Misusing Drugs. It'll give you some insight as to why your son or daughter might be doing what they are. And importantly, it gives you tips on how to cope and how to be more healthy through this rough time. You can grab that free from brenda zane.com/hindsight.
Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate it and I hope that these episodes are helping you stay strong and be very, very good to yourself, and I will meet you right back here next week.