Taking drugs with your children? Gen Z won’t even want to share a beer with usThe Guardian: Say nothing, she’s going to use it,” my 13-year-old daughter said to my 15-year-old son, like a Miranda warning. It was the week after the novelist Hanif Kureishi had tweeted: “I’ve had some great cocaine nights with my children, and I know friends who take MDMA with their kids, though this isn’t something I would do, out of the fear of talking too much.”
Before I even considered too deeply whether I’d ever take drugs with my kids – obviously this is a purely hypothetical, what-if question – it seemed useful to know whether they’d ever take drugs with me. Even though they said nothing, in case I used it, I knew the answer would be no. They’re very anti-drugs, for which I blame/thank the school. There are some areas of parenting that pit one sacred rule against another, and render it impossible to obey both: drug-taking is one. I take honesty and openness pretty seriously, because it corrupts if you lie to your children; it role-models mendacity, and opens up the possibility that there are secrets so dark that you, the putative authority, have to hide, which leaves who in charge, exactly? And yet at the same time, obviously, my first and overwhelming priority is that they remain alive and, in an ideal world, sane, so I would never want to normalise high-risk behaviours, create mini-adventurers who’ll try anything once, even if they have no idea what’s in the anything.
Unfortunately, to square these imperatives, I’d have to go back in time and be a completely different teenager. The thing that freaks me out about the condition of youth, having such a keen interest in the aforementioned remaining alive, is not the stupid things I might have done in the 80s, but the way we reacted when things went wrong. Terrible, life-changing things happened to people I knew, especially on LSD – third-degree burns, psychotic episodes – and far from seeing any of that as a deterrent.