DOING DRUGS WITH
PAUL DILLON

I'm sure many of you who read the title of this entry looked at it in disbelief and said surely that isn't a question that any parent in their right mind would ever even consider but sadly I'm hearing this more and more, right across the country. If it's not an actual account with Uber or a taxi company, there are more and more parents who are quite happy handing over a wad of cash to their teen so that they can 'safely' catch a cab home after attending a party or gathering on a Saturday night. And if you think I'm just talking about 17 year-olds here, I'm not. Sadly we're seeing Year 10s and even younger who are finding their own way home from these events. If you don't believe me, ask any taxi driver who works on a Saturday night how many very young teens they are increasingly being asked to pick-up from (as well as take to) parties. They will also tell you that many of them refuse the fares, particularly the pick-ups, because of the state so...

When it comes to teenage parties and gatherings there are some simple parenting rules I believe are incredibly important, all of which help to ensure your child's safety. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll highlight each of these in my blog entries and try to flesh them out a little in an effort to assist parents to understand why they are so important and provide some tips on how to put them into action. Let me start by saying that none of them will be easy and I am sure that your teen will not like you doing them but parenting isn't easy and hopefully you didn't become a parent and expect to be 'liked' all the time ... Adolescence is a time when young people are trying to establish their own identity, pulling away from their parents and becoming more influenced by same-age peers. I've talked about this before but in his book You and Your Adolescent , Laurence Steinberg says that 14-18 is "a time for distinguishing oneself from the crowd". He s...

As I travel around the country at the moment I am busy collecting information from some of the young people attending my presentations. I'm focussing on Year 10s and 11s and asking some of them to fill out a short questionnaire. I don't want to know their name or the school they're from so it's completely anonymous but hopefully it will give me greater insight into a couple of areas that I am currently fascinated about in regards to teenagers and how they are being parented (or at least how they perceive they are being parented) in the area of alcohol and parties. It's certainly not a rigorous piece of scientific research and I can't submit any of my 'findings' to a journal for publication. But what it does do is give me a very rough snapshot of what is happening across the country in this area. I really am in a very unique situation in that I get to speak to 10s of thousands of young people every year across all three systems - public, independent a...