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Synthetic drugs and kids – what parents need to know

Posted on November 10, 2011 by | Comments Off on Synthetic drugs and kids – what parents need to know

Girl with capsuleBath salts. Dragonfly. K2. Fake pot. Spice Gold. Mr. Nice Guy. Ivory Wave. Vanilla Sky. Europa.

If there’s one thing we can depend on, it’s the relentless creativity and productivity of the underground illegal drug market. There’s always some deadly new way to get high, usually with a bizarre, seemingly innocuous name. It will instantly be given credibility and PR by countless Youtube videos of teens being wasted and apparently having a fine old time. Sometimes these concoctions can even be whipped up from ingredients found in your average medicine cabinet and spice drawer, or ordered over the Internet.

Kids are curious. They try it out, perhaps when friends promise an exceptional high with “all natural ingredients” or “harmless cold medicines.”

And then they start dying.

Synthetic drugs are not new. This category includes things like methamphetamines and MDMA (commonly known as ecstasy). Unlike drugs like heroin or cocaine, which are illegal to possess in even the tiniest amounts, crystal meth and ecstasy are made from “controlled” substances like ephedrine and pseudoephedrine (found in cold medications), which are legal to possess. And until this past June when a new law was passed, Canada had earned the unwelcome reputation as a haven for these drug producers because much of the key manufacturing paraphernalia was not illegal to own or sell.

Other drugs, like synthetic pot, contain a chemical version of the cannabinoid that causes the high associated with marijuana. This synthetic alternative to THC (tetrahyrdocannibinol) was originally manufactured to treat multiple sclerosis and chemotherapy patients. Though banned in Canada and some U.S. states, it is often sold openly as incense or “spice” and can be ordered online. It tends to be sold in 3 gram packets in various flavours.

Smoking synthetic marijuana can have such side effects  as deep depression, hallucinations, feelings of impending death, and severe  panic attacks. And since “fake pot” can actually be 3 to 5 times stronger than real marijuana, kids can get in trouble judging how much of the drug to consume. Smoking the drug has particularly destructive effects on the lungs (one boy who died smoked it out of a plastic Pez candy dispenser). It has been linked to several deaths in the U.S.

“Bath salts” is the name of another synthetic drug. It contains various potent chemicals, including mephedrone, which is a stimulant. Like fake pot, it is often sold openly as another kind of product (typically as plant food) and is often labelled “not for human consumption.” Side effects include increased heart rate and blood pressure, not sleeping, not eating and eventually becoming paranoid.

Dragonfly (or Bromo-Dragonfly) is an extremely potent and long-acting psychedelic hallucinogen. A dose of a few milligrams can be life-threatening. It’s usually sold on blotter paper, though tablets, capsules or powder forms are sometimes distributed as well. Although the effects of the drug can last up to 36 hours, the experience of the high can go from lucid to extreme psychedelic intoxication and back again, leading some users to mistakenly take more and risk overdose. There have been deaths reported by users mixing Dragonfly with pot or ketamines, and it is sometimes confused with the less deadly street drug called 2C-E, leading to tragic results in at least one case recently publicized on the Dr. Oz show.

Bromo-Dragonfly has not yet been regulated by the Drug Enforcement Agency in the U.S. and can be ordered online. It has sent several teens to the emergency room so far this year.

So what practical advice can we offer to parents? Aside from knowing your kid and his or her habits, keep an eye out for sudden changes in friends, in behavior, school performance or physical appearance. Any unusual packages arriving by post, especially with customs declarations, should be promptly investigated.

Have regular discussions with your teen about the drugs that are out there, and he surprising ways they can be dangerous. It might not occur to a 14 or 15-year-old that they can have a stroke or heart attack that can leave them severely disabled or dead.

Parents should also educate their kids about what to do if they find a friend having seizures, vomiting or passed out. Too often, the life-saving measures that could potentially save a kid’s life are put off for precious minutes or hours simply because their peers are afraid of getting in trouble.

It’s the kind of advice we hope they never have to act upon, the kind of thing we don’t often realize we have to teach. But it can be the difference between a brush with the law and a funeral packed with high school students.

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Attitude of gratitude: can we teach our kids to be grateful?

Posted on October 31, 2011 by | Comments Off on Attitude of gratitude: can we teach our kids to be grateful?
http://www.kidscryingatdisneyland.com/2011/05/blog-post_18.html

www.kidscryingatdisneyland.com

It was a classic parenting pitfall, deliberately engineered by the evil geniuses at Disney World. I should have seen it coming, but I was taken totally off-guard.

My parents had generously flown our whole family down for a week at the amusement park, complete with on-site accommodations and meal package. It was a tremendous gift for all of us and an opportunity for plenty of memories and family fun.

We’d told our daughters (then 7 and 2) how lucky they were to go. We hadn’t done much airplane travel with them, so this was a really big deal. I had loaded up on Disney items on sale and at the dollar store before we went, and brought them along so I could dole out small gifts when we were there and avoid the vastly inflated prices in the park.

But what I hadn’t counted on was that every single big ride forced us to exit through the gift shop (thanks for the warning, Banksy). Adrenaline coursing through their little bodies, totally primed by the cleverly engineered multimedia experiences of spinning, bouncing and twirling through Disney worlds, our three daughters then found themselves face to face with retail versions of exactly the same Minnie Mouse, Princess or whatever animated character they had just seen in the ride. There were t-shirts, elaborate dress-up costumes, alarm clocks, stuffed animals, souvenir cups and a million other novelty items destined for brief, exhilarated enjoyment and then a quick descent into the eventual garage sale pile.

All around us, small children were either being indulged by credit card-carrying adults sporting strained smiles on their faces OR they were in various stages of consumption-related meltdown.

Somehow, our girls mostly managed to hold it together. They knew from experience that we don’t buy that kind of stuff, so they tended to gaze longingly at the shiny items without directly asking for them. When their grandmother indulged them one evening with some light-up Mickey Mouse wands, they were incredulous (“Mommy NEVER buys us things like this!”). But all around us, boys and girls either melted down or flashed their booty with exaggerated pride (at least until the next gift shop).

The whole experience made me think about the ways we teach our children the slippery concept of gratitude. As parents, we naturally want to them to truly appreciate all we do for them, a perspective that generally requires a certain amount of maturity and experience. But our culture surrounds them with constant pitches for more, bigger, better, newer, shinier, faster. And we tend to fall for it as much as they do (new iPad anyone? large screen plasma TV?).

Advertising and a culture of consumption instruct them on the ways we learn to define ourselves by our stuff. And since our stuff quickly gets outdated (replaced by newer versions), this culture requires a perpetual dissatisfaction, so that we are always motivated to buy newer, more stylish things.

If we have learned to express our love for our children through things, then it’s understandable that our kids have come to expect them as their due. The more we give them, the more they expect to be given. They feel entitled to have all they want. They become resentful and whiny when “everyone else in grade 2 has an iPod Touch.”

In her brilliant book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, author Wendy Mogel tells parents not to worry too  much about a lack of appreciation from our kids. Drawing from Jewish teachings, she says that deed is more important than creed: we need to teach our kids to use the right manners and expressions of appreciation, and the feeling of gratefulness will eventually follow.

She says that an impulse to do bad (yetzer hara) exists alongside the impulse to do good (yetzer tov). We need the former for the passions it can inflame in us, but we need to learn how to control it. Kids don’t know how to do this yet, and in teaching them the appropriate behaviors and self-control, they will become more inclined to be guided by the good instead of led astray by the evil.

It’s an interesting idea.

It’s the same reason we make our kids say “I’m sorry” when they really aren’t, or “thank you” without being particularly thankful. After going through the motions with these social norms for a while, do we not eventually internalize them?

After all, Mogel says our kids don’t respond to logic and reasoning (“you don’t need that plastic Disney Princess crown – you already have a lot of dress-up clothes”) or pious lecturing (“do you know how lucky you are to even be here in Disney World when kids all over the world have to go to bed hungry?”). She reminds us that parenting is about guidance, not consensus. When we say no, we can offer a short explanation and just move on, despite the wailing and tantrums that may ensue.

It’s good advice. Parents today often want to be their kids’ friends, and they try too hard to make them happy and be liked. In fact, being a good parent sometimes means making your kids unhappy and having them dislike you.

But what really struck me about her argument is recognizing that your kids’ lack of gratitude is not necessarily a personality flaw. It might just be a natural expression of their unrestrained zeal, their yetzer hara. If we can achieve a bit of critical distance (which is hard to do when faced with a loudly squalling child in the middle of a Disney gift shop), we might just see it as a normal part of childhood behavior.

While I do think there is some reason in her argument (no child is perfect – nor should we expect them to be), lack of gratitude must be consistently headed off with dialogue about what our children should be thankful for. Many parents find it very hard to exercise a disciplined reluctance to give in to most demands for consumer items (even if we can afford them). Itcan be challenging to make a clear distinction between expressions of love (time spent together, activities shared, hands held, fevered brows cooled, forgotten lunches driven to school) and buying stuff.

I think we need to say “no” to our kids sometimes simply for the experience of saying no. Because if they always get everything they want, why would they appreciate it? Gifts should (mostly) be saved for birthdays and holidays. Want a new skateboard? Save your allowance or wait for your birthday. Break your iPod? Dip into your savings to replace it or do without.

That’s what real life is like. And if we really love them, we will teach them that when they are young. One day they will be extremely thankful for that.

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Race, class, gender, beauty: American Girl’s not-so-hidden messages for little girls

Posted on October 11, 2011 by | 3 comments

All 3 of my daughters have owned — and loved — American Girl dolls thanks to generous gifts from family members over the years. Despite the obvious pleasure they’ve taken in these dolls, I’ve long had conflicting feelings about these very expensive playthings.

On the one hand, I really liked them having dolls modelled on nine-year-old girls rather than heavily made-up, impossibly skinny teenage girls. I enjoyed the racial diversity represented in their range (however imperfect). And given the voracious readers I was dealing with, I especially liked the wonderful series of chapter books from the American Girl Library detailing each character’s adventures in different historical time periods.

On the other hand, I loathed the incredible expense involved and the implied conspicuous consumption. The dolls’ clothes cost more than I usually spent on my own kids’ outfits. The Manhattan store we visited on trips to see family was a mobbed temple of rampant, thoughtless consumerism. When we made the mistake of going down there one Easter weekend several years ago, I feared my children would be literally trampled by hordes of frantic mothers stampeding the cash register to fork over $100 for their kids’ dolls. I cringed at the sight of all the little girls dressed in identical outfits to their dolls, mentally calculating the astronomical expense of each cheaply made outfit.

And I succumbed to their excitement and the euphoria.

On more than one occasion.

When we tried out the brunch at the store’s restaurant (complete with tiny seats and dishes for the dolls), my husband was disgusted to learn there was no men’s washroom easily accessible (“Don’t little girls have dads?” he wondered aloud).

I always felt a bit guilty about not buying my girls Canadian versions of the AG dolls (called Maplelea dolls), but they just weren’t nearly as cute (with the notable exception of Saila, their brand new Inuit doll, who is really quite lovely).

We also noticed some odd absences. There was no Asian doll in the AG line-up until very recently. Only one token doll for each race other than white. And the Native American, Latina, Jewish and African American dolls, though beautiful, were defined in their character bios and storylines entirely by their ethnicity. It’s not as if they were just regular girls with a range of skin colours and hair textures; they had to have teepees and make tortillas and have narrowly escaped slavery.

These details are important — I don’t mean to suggest they are not. And they do need to be part of the spectrum of kids’ toys. But if that is the only way non-white characterizations are allowed to occur in the mainstream, then we are missing an important opportunity to really normalize the concept of diversity. And if you aren’t sure about my point, look at the Playmobil line-up: we have princesses and veterinarians and farmers. All white. Then we have Asian Family (complete with camera around Dad’s neck) and African American Family. Where is the Asian vet? The African American princess?

Aside from one not terribly 2009 successful release of an American Girl homeless doll (named Gwen Thompson – see the Good Morning America clip here) there hasn’t been much criticism in the media.

(Really? A doll representing a homeless girl living in a car with her mother that retailed for $95? When 1 out of 50 American children are truly, honest-to-goodness homeless? Someone wasn’t thinking too clearly about the price of privilege with that one. But I digress.)

It seems that compared to so much of what is on offer in the raging acid-pink girly aisles of your local toy store, these dolls come out looking pretty darned good (if you can afford them, that is).

But one recent Huffington Post article just caught my eye, in which the author takes the AG company to task for the ultra-thin models in their successful American Girl Magazine:

And so my question to American Girl is why — if they care about little girls, if they want them to grown up with a life full of imagination, to grow up and be caring, responsible babysitters — why aren’t you doing anything to act out against what seems to be the biggest issue that girls, both big and little, face on a daily basis?  Flip through your own magazine.  It’s full of ways to be a better person, to have clean, safe fun with friends.  And yet every picture is of adolescent models: thin girls who in a few short years might be walking the catwalk, selling us the products and the body image that we’re supposed to want and have, but ultimately can’t and won’t.  I look through your magazine and I don’t see my daughter.  I don’t see normal girls, some who are short, some who are pudgy or overweight alongside the tall thin ones.  The reality I see in your magazine isn’t the reality of Isabela and some of her friends and classmates; it’s the reality of an industry that profits by telling us that we’re not good enough.  American Girl magazine runs the risk of telling my daughter, aged seven, that she’s not good enough.  Is this the best you can do?

Excellent question. And perhaps this diversity of size might also be applied to the dolls themselves, which while relatively normally proportioned, certainly don’t reflect the  20% of U.S. children under 11 who are considered clinically obese according to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta.

It comes down to our choices as parents: what do we want to reflect to our children in their toys and playthings? How much range of choice do we have in offering them different kids of representation? How much dialogue do we have with them about what is on offer?

I’d prefer my daughters to have an American Girl doll over a Bratz doll any day, but I’m not entirely satisfied there either. So we’ve used it as a platform for discussion about all of these different kinds of things since they got the dolls as presents from their great-aunt and uncle, right down to our fraught visits to the shops (in which they chose to spend their birthday money on stuffed dog companions for their dolls).

I was surprised and touched to see one of girls (then six years old) choose Josefina, the Latina doll, for her own, (though we live in Montreal and don’t personally know anyone Latino/a), simply because she loved her olive skin, thick hair and the accompanying chapter books about life two hundred years ago in New Mexico. I was always pleased to see the open-ended ways they played with the dolls (though my older ones have long since passed them down to their younger sister), where they were not limited to recreating the narrative of the TV shows that seem to define other dolls and action heroes.

In many ways, the dolls offer the girls whose families can afford them a wonderful play experience. But as a parent, it’s important not to ignore the complex issues that lurk beneath the blank, conventionally pretty faces we offer up to our children as models of girlhood.

 

 

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