Latest / ROAR with Danielle Davies: Women, Culture and Impact / Moms, Alcohol and Raising Resilient Kids with Jessica Lahey

Transcript

Moms, Alcohol and Raising Resilient Kids with Jessica Lahey · ROAR with Danielle Davies: Women, Culture and Impact

• 0:00
  When we ask parents why they think kids turn to drugs and
• 0:04
  alcohol, parents tend to say peer pressure.
• 0:07
  However, when you ask kids the same question why they would
• 0:10
  turn to drugs and alcohol, they say stress and anxiety.
• 0:14
  That was Jessica Leahy, and this is ROAR.
• 0:22
  Hi everybody. This is Danielle Davies, the
• 0:24
  host of Roar. Today's guest is Jessica Leahy,
• 0:27
  teacher, writer, podcast host, speaker, all around good person
• 0:31
  and author of The Gift of Failure and the Addiction,
• 0:34
  Inoculation. Her work explores resilience,
• 0:37
  failure and what kids actually learn from the adults around
• 0:40
  them. Work that's helped so many women
• 0:42
  rethink what it actually means to show up as a parent.
• 0:45
  Because while we say we want to raise independent, capable kids,
• 0:48
  a lot of us, myself included, feel this constant pressure to
• 0:51
  step in, smooth things over and get it right.
• 0:54
  And for parents, moms especially, that pressure can
• 0:57
  show up in ways we don't always talk about shaping how we
• 0:59
  parent, how we cope, what our kids are quietly absorbing from
• 1:02
  all of it. So today, we're talking about
• 1:04
  that tension and what happens when we start, if we can, to
• 1:07
  loosen our grip. Jas, I'm so glad you're here.
• 1:10
  Thank you so much for being here.
• 1:11
  I'm so happy to be here. I'm, I'm just absolutely
• 1:15
  thrilled. I'm going to jump right in
• 1:17
  because I have a lot of questions for you.
• 1:18
  And like I, I preempted by saying this almost feels like a,
• 1:23
  a therapy appointment for myself, but I think it probably
• 1:26
  feels like that for a lot of listeners and a lot of parents.
• 1:28
  Everybody's like get get to my question because if you're a
• 1:32
  parent, your highest stakes, your highest stakes endeavor is
• 1:36
  your kids, right? So, so a lot of your work
• 1:39
  challenges that an instinct to step in and fix things and
• 1:43
  prevent struggle. That instinct is so strong for
• 1:46
  parents. Why is it so hard to let our
• 1:48
  kids fail? It's, I mean, I talk about this
• 1:52
  from a neurological perspective. It just feels like our kid is in
• 1:55
  danger. It's, I mean, put really, really
• 1:58
  simply, the way our brain deals with the information that
• 2:01
  something's going wrong with our kid is it's just like, oh,
• 2:03
  emergency, emergency, step in, do something, fix it.
• 2:07
  But that that trigger for when that gets turned on has so moved
• 2:13
  into a place where like, Oh my gosh, fix it.
• 2:16
  You know, my daughter, I have two kids.
• 2:18
  My eldest is 27 and my youngest is 22 and just starting to apply
• 2:23
  for jobs. And I'm overwhelmed by how often
• 2:30
  I want to step in. Like, like there were little
• 2:32
  things just dumb. I mean, and I can't believe I'm
• 2:34
  going to admit this kind of stuff, but let me just admit
• 2:37
  this kind of stuff so that you can hear that the person who
• 2:40
  wrote a book about the gift of failure, about letting your kids
• 2:42
  fail and learn from those mistakes, how bad it is in my
• 2:46
  head sometimes. Because so there are a bunch of
• 2:49
  jobs. I have opinions and it's so hard
• 2:52
  to get a job right now. And she and her girlfriend are
• 2:55
  both just applying, applying, applying interview and not
• 2:58
  getting hearing anything back. It's just, it's a lot.
• 3:00
  And then a job came up. I found a job listing that
• 3:03
  happened across my my desk and I'm like, Oh my gosh, that's
• 3:07
  amazing. That's perfect.
• 3:09
  Can I pretend to be her to ask about like when the start date
• 3:14
  would be, you know, like all these dumb insane thoughts of
• 3:18
  like, wait, you're talking in your own head about pretending
• 3:22
  to be your daughter so that you can communicate with that
• 3:25
  organization, find out what the start date is so that she can
• 3:30
  get a That's bananas. And you would, if you heard
• 3:34
  about that coming from someone else, you would be like, what,
• 3:37
  what are you doing? So having this constant like
• 3:40
  conversation with myself, I have to, I have a mantra that sort of
• 3:44
  comes up, which is do I want this to be done my way or the
• 3:49
  perfect way right now? Or do I want her to be able to
• 3:51
  do it herself next time? And obviously, obviously she's
• 3:56
  22. Obviously she's this is her,
• 3:59
  this is even more so than college, which was her thing.
• 4:02
  Getting a job like this is not only is this about getting a
• 4:06
  job, this is about learning how to get a job.
• 4:09
  And I can't be within 1000 yards of that.
• 4:13
  That's, you know, I'm here for advice.
• 4:16
  I'm here for proofreading a resume, but I cannot be anywhere
• 4:20
  near that. So it's, it is a constant
• 4:23
  struggle. Even when my kids are 22 and 27,
• 4:25
  I'm constantly like, you know, just churning with how I can
• 4:29
  over insert myself and make things happen for them.
• 4:34
  It's not it's crazy. I'm glad you actually said it
• 4:36
  because I've, I've actually been like looking things up for
• 4:40
  myself recently where I'm like enmeshed, like parent enmesh me,
• 4:44
  like all this stuff because and I'll, I generally try not to
• 4:48
  talk about my kids too, too much, but my son is in College
• 4:53
  in Hawaii and we live in New Jersey.
• 4:55
  So that was like a really big, I'm like, I got this down.
• 4:58
  Like I let him go to Hawaii like I am, I am so proud of myself,
• 5:04
  but it's actually made it so much worse because I'm like,
• 5:08
  you're even driving when I'm asleep.
• 5:10
  Like there's no time that I'm not overly invested in your
• 5:18
  safety and well-being so that anytime he calls, you know, he
• 5:22
  he might just call to be like, Hey, had a great day.
• 5:24
  But if it's anything at all negative, I'm because of the
• 5:28
  distance we're or that's just exacerbated it.
• 5:30
  But it's it's just interesting because you can make all these
• 5:33
  strides, then just one little thing you can, you can step back
• 5:38
  and be like, how can I facilitate this for you or
• 5:43
  better? Facilitate it.
• 5:45
  Here's here's something that happened a couple years ago.
• 5:48
  So my husband and I were in San Francisco and got a text from my
• 5:54
  eldest said can I call you? And it turns out my eldest got
• 5:58
  in a car accident. It was minor, it was nothing,
• 6:00
  but it was in a rental car. And he didn't realize we hadn't
• 6:04
  had the conversation about how insurance works with rental
• 6:07
  cars. And because he thought he was
• 6:09
  still on our insurance, he didn't get insurance.
• 6:11
  And so he had to. He was asking a lot of
• 6:14
  logistical questions about how to handle this.
• 6:16
  This is like at the accident scene.
• 6:19
  And I said we need to loop your sister into this text thread
• 6:24
  because this could happen to her and she needs to learn from this
• 6:27
  too. So how can we maximize?
• 6:29
  So yeah, we're going to talk you through some of this stuff and
• 6:31
  help you think about, you know, here's how this works.
• 6:34
  And of course, there's so much to be learned from this.
• 6:36
  So now, like Ben learned, you know, yeah, you get the car
• 6:40
  insurance and you, you know, this is how rental cars work.
• 6:45
  And he actually learned a ton from that experience.
• 6:47
  And it was, you know, luckily no one was hurt.
• 6:50
  But my daughter, if she had missed that whole text thread,
• 6:54
  if we hadn't moved that to our group chat off of an individual
• 6:57
  chat, then she wouldn't have learned everything that her
• 7:00
  brother learned. And that was really important
• 7:02
  information for her, too, because in a couple years, she's
• 7:04
  going to be eligible to rent cars, too.
• 7:06
  So why not make it, you know, a big let's learn from each
• 7:10
  other's mistakes kind of situation, too.
• 7:12
  So there are so many times when, you know, my first thought,
• 7:15
  inevitably my daughter got stuck in our car somewhere.
• 7:20
  She, I can't remember what happened.
• 7:21
  It was probably a flat tire or something.
• 7:23
  Yeah, it was a flat tire. My first thought was I must get
• 7:26
  in the car and drive there, You know, like I have to go now to
• 7:31
  go rescue her from this. And she ended up learning so
• 7:35
  much and being so resourceful and figuring a whole bunch of
• 7:39
  different things out and it was great.
• 7:41
  It ended up being a great experience.
• 7:43
  The person she was going to pick up also learn some stuff about
• 7:46
  figuring out an alternate way to get home.
• 7:48
  It was like it was great all around.
• 7:50
  Was she really nervous and anxious at the time?
• 7:53
  And was I nervous and anxious at the time?
• 7:55
  Yeah, and sitting on my hands at home and keeping my car keys out
• 7:59
  of reach was. But it was really, really
• 8:02
  important. And now she has so much more
• 8:04
  confidence around being able to handle stuff.
• 8:07
  She. That's less of a worry.
• 8:11
  It's it's crazy too, because you can see it happen when they do
• 8:15
  when you do manage to step back and and like how they respond
• 8:20
  and there is so much more confidence there.
• 8:23
  And I'm thinking of so many instances.
• 8:25
  But my son had to bought a new car, bought up new to him car in
• 8:28
  Hawaii. And my husband was really like,
• 8:31
  don't do it. I don't think it's a good idea.
• 8:34
  You're going to you're going to get you don't know what you're
• 8:36
  looking for. Like don't do it.
• 8:40
  And of course he did it. He bought the car and he needed
• 8:42
  it. He and I'm, I'm actually glad
• 8:43
  that he bought the car. But almost immediately he called
• 8:46
  me and was like, dad was right. The tires have I got to get all
• 8:50
  new wheels? I'm like, well, wait, it might,
• 8:53
  it might just be low. Like let's, let's start with,
• 8:56
  let's start there. And I was like, just call and he
• 8:59
  was in a rush and he, you know, he didn't know his way around
• 9:01
  and he got and he while on the phone with me, he managed to,
• 9:06
  you know, find a garage, drive over to the garage, get air in
• 9:09
  his hair. He actually said, he's like, I
• 9:11
  have never felt like more of an adult.
• 9:13
  And I'm like, yeah, which is so that's what he had to go to
• 9:17
  Hawaii. He had to go for his own self
• 9:21
  protection because otherwise I'd be like circling around him.
• 9:26
  Well, and I want to weave in, you know, you talk about
• 9:29
  parenting and, and this idea of stepping back or, or, you know,
• 9:33
  obviously letting kids learn things on their own, But you
• 9:35
  were also very you're an expert in addiction and you've written
• 9:40
  the addiction inoculation. So I want to kind of weave this
• 9:42
  in early and say, you know, you talk not just about prevention
• 9:46
  and your own experiences, but also about what kids learn from
• 9:49
  the adults around them. How did your understanding of
• 9:52
  addiction shape the way you think about parenthood
• 9:54
  specifically? You know you're a mom.
• 9:57
  Yeah, and actually, I want to back up just a second and make
• 9:59
  sure your listeners know. So I'm actually, before I wrote
• 10:03
  Gift to Failure, you know, I was in the classroom for 20 years,
• 10:05
  middle school, high school, taught every grade from 6 to 12,
• 10:08
  was an education journalist at The New York Times, The
• 10:11
  Atlantic, The Washington Post, had a column at The New York
• 10:15
  Times for three years on the intersection of parenting and
• 10:18
  education. So even though I'm telling all
• 10:20
  these anecdotal stories, that's not where my expertise is coming
• 10:23
  from. So I'm an expert in, you know,
• 10:26
  learning education, that sort of stuff.
• 10:28
  So the what was interesting about the addiction inoculation
• 10:33
  is that in the interim between writing the Gift of Failure,
• 10:38
  which I got the contract for in 2013 and then it came out in
• 10:43
  2015, as soon as I got the contract for the Gift of
• 10:46
  failure, I had to get sober. I just, it was time my dad just
• 10:52
  confronted me and was like, you know, you're definitely an
• 10:55
  alcoholic because he knows because he was raised by 1.
• 10:59
  And I talk about substance use prevention as being like a 100
• 11:02
  piece puzzle and that 100 piece puzzle of like dropping all
• 11:06
  these little clues into place, real information around
• 11:10
  substances and what they do to the brain and, and all that sort
• 11:13
  of stuff is also part of prevention.
• 11:15
  So substance use prevention plays double duty as both
• 11:18
  substance use prevention, but as giving people the information
• 11:23
  they're going to need in order to get to recovery faster.
• 11:26
  Because you don't that one, that 100th piece of the puzzle drops
• 11:31
  into place and you realize, oh, I'm in deep Doo Doo.
• 11:33
  I need to start, I need to get better.
• 11:36
  I'm ready. You know, it can't fall into
• 11:38
  place and lose pieces one through 99 are there and so much
• 11:42
  of substance use prevention are those pieces.
• 11:44
  So my kids, because they were born to my my biological
• 11:49
  children are at a higher risk of developing substance use
• 11:53
  disorder. It's just, you know, genetics
• 11:55
  and epigenetics are about 50 to 60% of the risk picture.
• 11:59
  And so my kid with my kids, it was particularly urgent.
• 12:03
  This wasn't a like, oh, I don't need to worry about that.
• 12:06
  No one needs it gets to be in the boat of, oh, I don't need to
• 12:08
  worry about that. But I really had to get on the
• 12:11
  stick and start dealing with it. So a ton changed when I got
• 12:15
  sober. And then I looked at my kids and
• 12:17
  I'm like, crap. If I grew up with many
• 12:20
  generations of people with substance use disorder and I'm
• 12:24
  just the latest one, what does that mean for them?
• 12:26
  Like I didn't, I didn't know I couldn't find a great resource
• 12:30
  that covered both the best practices for parenting and best
• 12:34
  practices for education. So I'm very fortunate I got to
• 12:38
  write that book. So I did a couple of years of
• 12:40
  research before I even started writing that book.
• 12:42
  Because the way non fiction publishing works is you have to
• 12:45
  sell a proposal and that proposal is a really deep
• 12:49
  outline of a book with chapter summaries and a sample chapter
• 12:52
  and all that stuff. So it took me about two years to
• 12:54
  research and write the proposal and sell the book.
• 12:59
  And that's been, I think I'm very proud of the gift of
• 13:03
  failure, but I think the addiction inoculation was the
• 13:05
  book I was meant to write. That's like my, that is what has
• 13:09
  become my life's work and getting to, to help people talk
• 13:13
  about substance use prevention, even the people who don't want
• 13:16
  to talk about substance use prevention to find ways into
• 13:18
  that conversation to ease that burden, to ease the, that first
• 13:24
  hurdle into the conversation that's become sort of my life's
• 13:28
  work again. And, and I absolutely love it.
• 13:32
  And I absolutely adore not just talking to the.
• 13:35
  So when I go into like a school or community organization, I
• 13:38
  often get to talk to the kids during the day.
• 13:40
  And then sometimes I'll talk to teachers in the afternoon at a
• 13:43
  school and then in the evening I talk to community.
• 13:46
  And my job is to start conversations, to give people
• 13:50
  the vocabulary to have conversations about these
• 13:53
  really, really important topics like substance use prevention.
• 13:56
  And those two things go hand in hand with gift of failure.
• 13:58
  I mean, there's a, I'm sorry to mix so many metaphors, but
• 14:01
  there's a dovetail between gift of failure and addiction,
• 14:04
  inoculation around competence, self efficacy, self advocacy,
• 14:11
  the feeling that the actions you take can affect change and
• 14:17
  having making a mistake or not being able to do something and
• 14:21
  having to struggle to learn how to do it and then mastering it.
• 14:25
  That feeling right there of mastery, competence, self
• 14:28
  building, self efficacy is really preventative against
• 14:31
  substance use disorder and it's an amazing source of dopamine in
• 14:35
  the brain. So when you achieve something
• 14:37
  that you didn't think you could do or that you've had to work
• 14:39
  hard to figure out, the dopamine just gets released in the brain.
• 14:43
  And that's a wonderful natural source of dopamine, rather than
• 14:46
  having to go look for it somewhere else.
• 14:48
  OK, real quick, if you're listening and thinking more
• 14:52
  women should be hearing conversations like this, the
• 14:54
  best way to support the show is just to follow or subscribe
• 14:57
  wherever you are. It really does help it reach
• 14:59
  more people. Thanks so much.
• 15:01
  OK, back to the show. Let me ask you a question.
• 15:04
  So I know and, and, and I know like, and I appreciate that you
• 15:08
  have all the science background and that you're actually able to
• 15:11
  speak about it both ways, right? Because if I had an audience who
• 15:14
  is a scientific audience, you could speak about it that way.
• 15:16
  And I, if I don't and I, and since I'm not, I imagine my
• 15:20
  listeners aren't either. You're able to talk about it
• 15:22
  anecdotally and and kind of. And I mention it.
• 15:25
  I mention it very specifically because I think there are a lot
• 15:27
  of people who put themselves out as experts on topics and then
• 15:30
  are absolutely willing to, you know, whether it's an expert who
• 15:34
  speaks outside of their expertise at that I think is
• 15:38
  just as damaging as someone who's willing to just put
• 15:40
  themselves out there as an expert and doesn't have, you
• 15:43
  know, the research cred behind them.
• 15:45
  So I just like to make sure it's not me talking out of my butt.
• 15:48
  Absolutely. Absolutely.
• 15:51
  No, I, I'm glad because I didn't include that and I think that's
• 15:54
  really important specifically as I ask you the next question,
• 15:58
  because especially regarding addiction.
• 16:01
  Well, both of these things really, there's a real pushback
• 16:04
  from just every woman that I know, you know, I know so many
• 16:07
  women who are first of all, like checking their kids 60,000
• 16:11
  grades. Are they did they ask this
• 16:12
  teacher that? They're all over it and it's
• 16:15
  hard to be a parent, you know, I mean, again, this is totally
• 16:18
  anecdotal. This is no research.
• 16:20
  This is just my experience. It is hard.
• 16:23
  It is no joke. It is a lot of work and and I
• 16:26
  think any parent will say that, but the addiction part also,
• 16:30
  there's pushback because we are a culture that that really touts
• 16:35
  the use of alcohol. And we have normalized so much
• 16:38
  things like I need a drink after today or wine mom culture.
• 16:43
  I mean, yeah, I haven't drank in eight months.
• 16:47
  And just last night I said to my husband, I'm like, you know what
• 16:49
  I could really use right now? He's a really big glass of wine.
• 16:53
  I was like. Really not gonna do it.
• 16:55
  It's really complicated not having an escape hatch.
• 16:59
  I've had to, yeah, I've had to learn all kinds of stuff.
• 17:02
  But we actually, it's funny you say that because I was, you
• 17:05
  know, I get a lot of questions about sort of the mom, mommy,
• 17:08
  wine culture, all that sort of stuff.
• 17:10
  But then one, you stop drinking. And especially when you learn a
• 17:14
  lot about marketing and you learn about how alcohol is
• 17:17
  marketed to us. Occasionally you'll be watching
• 17:20
  a show or a movie and you're like, whoa, that's just, that's
• 17:24
  a lot, not just a lot of drinking, but a lot of messaging
• 17:27
  that, that is the obvious answer.
• 17:30
  And so, OK, so my, my guilty pleasure watch lately has been
• 17:34
  the show, the Madison. It's set in Montana.
• 17:37
  It's just, it's light and, and nothing and wonderful and, and
• 17:41
  it's, it's sad, but it's also anyway, at every single turn,
• 17:45
  when anything gets a little bit hard or complicated, someone
• 17:49
  will reach into a bag and pull out like tiny airplane.
• 17:54
  Like, here's how I got through my divorce.
• 17:55
  And she pulls like 6 little vodka bottles out of her purse,
• 17:59
  you know, in order to go to therapy, she and her therapist
• 18:03
  get drunk together. It's like and, and fine.
• 18:06
  And I have no problem with people who don't have a problem
• 18:11
  with alcohol drinking. On the other hand, it's really
• 18:15
  worrisome to me that kids are getting the message that that
• 18:20
  that is the obvious first stop to managing.
• 18:25
  You know, you go to therapist, you're going to drink with your
• 18:27
  therapist, you have problems that you got to handle a grown
• 18:30
  up problem. You drink at it.
• 18:32
  And that's what worries me. And to step it back and sort of
• 18:36
  give it to you from a real world perspective.
• 18:39
  So whenever I speak at a school or community organization, I
• 18:42
  make a little welcome video and I give everyone my e-mail
• 18:44
  address so that they can ask me questions ahead of time or tell
• 18:47
  me what they want me to talk about.
• 18:49
  And I get tons and tons of questions.
• 18:51
  And then when I'm doing the event, I give people my e-mail
• 18:54
  address again. And inevitably the most amazing
• 18:57
  questions come from the kids. Lately I've been getting a lot
• 19:01
  of questions about is it OK that my parents give me melatonin
• 19:05
  every night to sleep? And is.
• 19:08
  And so that's really two separate questions.
• 19:10
  Is there a problem with taking melatonin every night to sleep?
• 19:13
  And the answer is it's not the worst thing in the world, but
• 19:16
  also your body will will change its melatonin release in order
• 19:21
  because you're supplementing. But the real could, the real
• 19:25
  issue for me there is when you give kids something every single
• 19:29
  night in order to have a normally bought normal bodily
• 19:32
  function, something that is normal and natural and something
• 19:36
  we're supposed to be able to do. What you're telling them is
• 19:39
  here's a medication for this AB so that you need to have for
• 19:43
  this absolutely normal human function.
• 19:46
  And a lot of parents are giving melatonin in lieu of looking at
• 19:52
  sort of evening bedtime sleep hygiene.
• 19:56
  By the way, my very, very favorite book about this is by
• 19:59
  Lisa L Lewis and it's called The Sleep Deprived Teen.
• 20:03
  It's fantastic. But yeah, those things worry me.
• 20:07
  And it's not just messaging about like drink at that
• 20:10
  problem. It's messaging of you're nervous
• 20:14
  on a flight, you take a Xanax, you're nervous about this, you
• 20:16
  do that. You know, those sorts of
• 20:18
  regular, totally normalized messaging, especially around
• 20:22
  alcohol, because why on earth are we talking about drugs and
• 20:25
  alcohol? Alcohol is a drug.
• 20:27
  Why aren't we just talking about drugs?
• 20:28
  Somehow alcohol gets moved out of that box because it's so
• 20:32
  normalized in our society, especially around things like
• 20:35
  sports or, you know, dating. And, you know, there's all sorts
• 20:39
  of places where alcohol is just an totally accepted, totally
• 20:43
  normal part of our human existence.
• 20:47
  And some of those things just you were modeling some weird
• 20:52
  behaviors for kids, some maladaptive behaviors for kids.
• 20:57
  Yeah, and part of me and I, I have to say, you know, you're
• 21:00
  it's funny. You're talking about seeing it
• 21:02
  on a show years ago when I was involved in politics, I used to
• 21:06
  love the show Scandal. Talk about taking a break from
• 21:09
  your daily. Let's just continue stressing
• 21:12
  out about this. But she was famous for always
• 21:15
  pouring a, a humongous glass of red wine and eating popcorn.
• 21:18
  Well, I, I mean, it was like if the show was on, it was so,
• 21:23
  yeah, it was marketed so well. It seems like this is.
• 21:27
  And I feel like every time I watched it, I had a glass of red
• 21:31
  wine and I skipped the popcorn. Of course, that was not nearly
• 21:34
  as compelling, but I just and and I'm a grown adult who sees
• 21:39
  what's happening. So when you when you aim this
• 21:43
  towards children or when they see us, you know, I've seen, God
• 21:47
  forbid, my own kids have said to me, oh, mom, you should have a
• 21:49
  glass of wine. Like, you know, that's that's
• 21:52
  probably well, that's surely not signaling anything good.
• 21:55
  Can I ask you a question? I know that in other countries,
• 21:58
  this is not anything that I was planning to ask you.
• 22:00
  So bear with me. In other countries, you know,
• 22:02
  alcohol is particularly wine is like a much more universally.
• 22:09
  You know where I'm going. You're you're dancing into one
• 22:11
  of the best, most beloved questions that I get So and the
• 22:15
  biggest myth I. Yes, bust it, bust it.
• 22:19
  Oh, OK people. They'll say kids drink alcohol
• 22:21
  when they're 16. Kids drink and the pub in
• 22:23
  Ireland or have wine with their lunch in Italy.
• 22:26
  Yeah. Yeah, OK, so if you, so this is
• 22:30
  if anyone's going to get mad at me about anything.
• 22:33
  And keep in mind I work very hard to push people just a
• 22:38
  little bit to think in a new way.
• 22:39
  But if people get angry at me, then they stop listening and
• 22:42
  then I'm not doing my job well, right.
• 22:43
  So I, I work really hard to balance that.
• 22:47
  The thing the people get most upset with me about is the idea,
• 22:52
  and I write about it in the addiction inoculation that, you
• 22:55
  know, a lot of people have their two big myths in parenting and
• 22:58
  one of them around alcohol. And one of them is that if you
• 23:00
  give your kids sips that they'll grow up to be moderate drinkers,
• 23:04
  that somehow, if you model moderation for them, that it
• 23:11
  will be no big deal and they won't flip out and go nuts and
• 23:14
  drink a ton the first time. It's available to them freely.
• 23:17
  And I 100% bought, bought into that and was a fan of that.
• 23:22
  And you know, I'm a very, because I love to read.
• 23:25
  I'm a very sort of, I've romanticized alcohol and I talk
• 23:28
  about this in the addiction inoculation as well.
• 23:31
  And in fact, one of the hardest things for me is when I'm
• 23:34
  watching a show and I'm watching someone have a glass of wine to
• 23:38
  relax. I don't miss the wine exactly,
• 23:41
  but I miss that hatch. I miss that, you know, I miss my
• 23:46
  ability to have that. But I can't have one glass of
• 23:48
  wine. That's just not how I work.
• 23:51
  OK, so the European moderation myth.
• 23:53
  Here's the problem with the European moderation myth.
• 23:56
  According to the World Health Organization, Europe, Europe has
• 24:00
  the European region as a whole has the highest rates of disease
• 24:03
  and death attributable to alcohol.
• 24:06
  So when you look at disease burden attributable to alcohol
• 24:08
  and death cause of death, all cause of death alcohol, they
• 24:15
  they get both of those awards, right.
• 24:17
  If you look at the highest drinking, the heaviest drinking
• 24:20
  countries in the world, seven out of the top ten are in the
• 24:23
  European region, however, are. So then people get very heated.
• 24:29
  I made a video about this. I have these like 400 different
• 24:31
  videos at my website on all topics from both books.
• 24:35
  So I made the videos, by the way, that's awesome.
• 24:38
  They're really short. They're like 90 seconds.
• 24:40
  I made that video. And then I had to make like 6
• 24:42
  follow up videos because people were so pissed off with me and I
• 24:46
  had to break down like every country.
• 24:48
  And who's the exception? And so you brought up a couple
• 24:50
  interesting things, which is #1 yes, there are exceptions.
• 24:55
  What's fascinating about the exception countries is that
• 24:58
  they, generally speaking, it's not acceptable to be really
• 25:04
  falling over drunk in public. That's just not a thing.
• 25:08
  So for example, Italy has one of the higher rates of daily
• 25:11
  drinking in the world in the, in the European region, sorry, but
• 25:16
  one of the lower rates of disease and death attributable
• 25:18
  to alcohol. So what you're seeing there is
• 25:22
  more of a moderation culture than than, you know, imbibing
• 25:28
  until you fall over. Whereas if you look at places
• 25:30
  like the UK, when you look at places like, you know, Ireland,
• 25:35
  when you look at places like, you know, some of the other
• 25:38
  countries that have a heavier disease and death burden, You
• 25:42
  know, I was in, I was in Northern Ireland a bunch of
• 25:45
  years ago when I was still teaching full time.
• 25:49
  And I had like my parent and mother hat on watching these
• 25:54
  kids who have essentially alcohol poisoning laying in the
• 25:57
  street on a weekend night. And I just want to scoop them
• 25:59
  all up and take them to the hospital.
• 26:01
  And I went to school in England for a couple of years.
• 26:04
  I, you know, it's just a part of the culture to get really
• 26:07
  hammered and, and drinking is a big part of the social thing.
• 26:09
  So when you look at the exceptions, what we're talking
• 26:11
  about are places that have created culture where it's just
• 26:14
  not cool to be falling over drunk.
• 26:18
  And that is sort of proof that we can build cultures on the
• 26:23
  family level, on the state level, on the school level, on
• 26:26
  the community level around alcohol, right?
• 26:28
  The other thing we have to keep in mind here is that just
• 26:32
  modeling moderation for someone like me who can't learn
• 26:35
  moderation is not going to have any effect.
• 26:37
  Like you can model moderation for me all day long and it's not
• 26:41
  going to have any effect on whether or not I can moderate
• 26:43
  alcohol. Plus I have this genetic
• 26:45
  predisposition and all sorts of other things.
• 26:48
  The other big myth is, by the way, is the kids are going to
• 26:50
  drink anyway. And so therefore I might as well
• 26:52
  have them to my house, take away everyone's keys, they'll be
• 26:55
  safe. They can drink here, no one can
• 26:56
  drive. And the problem with that is
• 27:00
  that kids who do not, kids who grow up in a family without any
• 27:04
  consistent messaging around drinking, like the fact that
• 27:09
  it's not that you're not supposed to drink, most people
• 27:12
  say until it's legal for you. I like to stay away from that as
• 27:15
  a reason because that's a just because answer.
• 27:17
  And teenagers aren't big into just because answers.
• 27:20
  I like to say until your brain is done developing, which
• 27:23
  happens in the early to mid 20s. So no, you can't drink until we
• 27:27
  don't drink in this house. Until your brain is done
• 27:29
  developing. Kids who don't grow up with that
• 27:32
  message are 70% more likely to start drinking early.
• 27:36
  This is based on the study that just came out about 6 weeks ago
• 27:40
  from a huge data set. The other thing we know is
• 27:43
  generally speaking, kids who grew up in a in a family with a
• 27:47
  consistent and clear message of no, not until your brain is done
• 27:50
  developing and kids have information on what's happening
• 27:53
  with their brain. Those kids just have much lower
• 27:55
  rates of of alcohol use, drug and alcohol use.
• 27:59
  Whereas kids who grew up in a permissive atmosphere around
• 28:03
  drugs and alcohol have much higher rates of developing
• 28:07
  substance use disorder and drinking early are using early.
• 28:10
  And the reason for that is that the younger a kid is when they
• 28:14
  first start using, the higher their lifelong risk of
• 28:16
  developing substance use disorder by big numbers, not by
• 28:20
  small amounts. So understanding that the reason
• 28:25
  I repeat constantly delay, delay, delay is not just about
• 28:29
  brain development, which is super important because
• 28:31
  adolescent drinking and drug use is not the same thing as adult
• 28:34
  drinking and drug use. Once that brain is done
• 28:37
  developing, it's much less dangerous for the brain to use
• 28:40
  drugs and alcohol. But when the adolescent
• 28:43
  cognitive development is happening, which again doesn't,
• 28:46
  that door doesn't really creak shut slowly until the early to
• 28:50
  mid 20s. It's much more dangerous short
• 28:53
  term and long term damage to the brain.
• 28:55
  We see it in lots of different substances and lots of different
• 28:59
  studies and brain studies. Anyway, lots of reasons that
• 29:03
  those two myths and when you're doing the thing with, you know,
• 29:06
  having other people's kids over to drink in the basement, when
• 29:09
  you take the keys away, not only are you raising your own kids
• 29:12
  risk of developing substance use disorder over their lifetime
• 29:15
  because they're more likely to start early, you're raising
• 29:18
  their peers risk as well. Because peer cohort is such an
• 29:22
  important part of the substance use prevention picture.
• 29:26
  Not just because kids are more likely to do drugs and alcohol
• 29:30
  if their friends are more likely to do drugs and alcohol and or
• 29:32
  sorry if their friends are doing drugs and alcohol.
• 29:35
  Your kids perception of how risky it is drops if they see
• 29:41
  their parents or their friends doing drugs and alcohol.
• 29:45
  And I haven't seen these studies, but I would love to
• 29:48
  know if kids are seeing it on Scandal and the Madison and all
• 29:51
  these different places and they're seeing that that's a
• 29:53
  legitimate coping mechanism. Does their perception of the
• 29:57
  dangers of alcohol and drugs drop?
• 29:59
  Probably. I mean, it's we know if they see
• 30:02
  it in their own family and in their peer group that it drops.
• 30:04
  So, you know, we want them to have a healthy understanding of
• 30:09
  the actual risk, not the anyway, we want them to understand the
• 30:13
  real risks. OK, this leads me to two
• 30:16
  questions. Sure, questions Based on that,
• 30:19
  I'm going to ask you the first one first.
• 30:22
  There's I, I feel again, this is not scientific.
• 30:25
  This is my own observation. I feel like I see a connection
• 30:30
  and I don't tell me what you think when you look at it.
• 30:33
  Do you see this connection between parents, the pressure to
• 30:36
  do it right, to not fail your kids to have them have the best
• 30:42
  go at it, whatever that looks like for you.
• 30:45
  And how we cope with that pressure, IE possibly turning to
• 30:49
  drink. It almost feels it feels like it
• 30:51
  feeds into it because you know, and and then if your kid has a
• 30:55
  bad day, that pressure is even more of I think I'll have a
• 30:59
  drink because you're, you're kind of coping with your own
• 31:03
  failure or theirs or your perceived.
• 31:06
  Research. Yeah, please.
• 31:08
  So a couple of years ago, we have a couple of really huge,
• 31:13
  wonderful data sets. We have the Monitoring the
• 31:15
  Future data set that comes out of University of Michigan.
• 31:18
  Love it, love it, love it. Big dork.
• 31:20
  Every time that study that that survey comes out, it's comes out
• 31:23
  in a big report once a year. I'm like, woo Hoo, let's read it
• 31:26
  all. And then there's a new, there's
• 31:29
  a cohort that's been going for a couple years called the ABCD
• 31:32
  survey. That one's massive.
• 31:33
  That's going to give us so much amazing research as we move
• 31:36
  through. So we're getting data out of
• 31:39
  those. We're getting papers out of
• 31:41
  those data sets all the time. And what?
• 31:44
  And just in the last year, what we know is when we ask parents
• 31:50
  why they think kids turn to drugs and alcohol, parents tend
• 31:54
  to say peer pressure. We would love to believe it's
• 31:57
  because the bad kid influenced my kid, right?
• 32:00
  Oh, totally, totally right. And peer cohort is definitely
• 32:04
  part of it. It's the reason there's an
• 32:06
  entire chapter on peers in the addiction inoculation.
• 32:09
  However, when you ask kids the same question, why they would
• 32:13
  turn to drugs and alcohol, they say stress and anxiety.
• 32:16
  So when you look at then if you start looking at what's causing
• 32:21
  the stress and anxiety for them, that feeling of needing to be
• 32:25
  perfect and needing to succeed, needing to fulfill their parents
• 32:29
  hopes and dreams and wish for what they want their kids to be,
• 32:32
  all that sort of stuff, living up to.
• 32:35
  And then, you know, for their own part, you know, being
• 32:39
  financially self-sufficient, that's really scary.
• 32:42
  Adulting is really scary. You know, we're also
• 32:45
  specifically talking about a group of kids that's just come
• 32:47
  out of COVID. My 22 year old, you know, spent
• 32:50
  a lot of high school in, you know, doing COVID stuff and not
• 32:53
  being able to go on dates or see friends or do all that stuff.
• 32:58
  So if that's true, if that you know, when we ask kids and they
• 33:02
  say, yeah, it's stress and anxiety then, and I am not one
• 33:06
  of those people who's like, oh, let's eliminate all stress and
• 33:09
  anxiety. But what I do know and thank
• 33:11
  goodness for books like Lisa Damore's Under Pressure,
• 33:14
  wonderful book about helping reframe stress and anxiety for
• 33:19
  kids. Is this stress is an anxiety our
• 33:25
  part of what keeps us moving forward motivation.
• 33:29
  So I use the analogy a lot with kids like yes, sometimes, like
• 33:32
  when I'm on deadline, I am stressed out because I have a
• 33:36
  deadline. But what I also know is that I'm
• 33:38
  better with the deadline. I'm sharper.
• 33:40
  I'm more on task. So I have a literary agent and
• 33:44
  she's wonderful and she doesn't tend to pressure me, but what I
• 33:48
  will do is e-mail her and say I will have chapter 6 to you by
• 33:52
  Friday. That's I made that deadline up.
• 33:56
  It's totally of my own making, but she's gonna hold me to it.
• 34:00
  And that's why I also have two friends.
• 34:02
  I have a rabbit behind me and we call it our accountability
• 34:05
  Bunny. I love that.
• 34:07
  It's accountability buddy. I have two, not only do I have
• 34:11
  two best friends who will hold me to deadlines if I ask them
• 34:15
  to, I also have a larger group of sort of colleaguey peer
• 34:20
  friend group who once a year we sort of talk about deadlines and
• 34:24
  goals and things like that and they'll hold me to them.
• 34:26
  And those are all really important.
• 34:28
  Is it stressful that I and especially when I was hosting
• 34:31
  the podcast a lot, I was constantly talking about my
• 34:35
  goals for the year. And then so I'm putting like my
• 34:37
  own personally made deadlines out into the world.
• 34:40
  It would be a a lot less stressful if I would tell no one
• 34:43
  about that because then if I screw it up or if I don't make
• 34:46
  it, I'm less embarrassed. I guess fewer people will hold
• 34:50
  me to it. But it's really helpful for me.
• 34:52
  So if we can model for our kids that some stress is really,
• 34:56
  really useful and it's very important.
• 34:58
  The other thing we need to think about is, and when we talk about
• 35:02
  risk factors, a lot of parents say, well, I don't want to tell
• 35:04
  my kid that they have a genetic predisposition for substance use
• 35:07
  disorder because that'll freak them out, right?
• 35:09
  Or they might think, well, it's going to be this way anyway, so
• 35:12
  I might as well just do it. We would never talk that way, by
• 35:15
  the way, about like risk for hypertension or diabetes or, you
• 35:21
  know, all of these other health risks that it's important that
• 35:23
  we know what our risk factors are so that we can eat well or
• 35:28
  choose to exercise or whatever that thing is.
• 35:32
  The other, but the other thing is that when we, I talk about
• 35:36
  this a little bit in the addiction inoculation that we
• 35:39
  moved during a really risky period of time for my daughter,
• 35:44
  transitions are a riskier time for developing, for use,
• 35:47
  starting to use substances. And I was talking to doctor Dan
• 35:50
  Siegel, one of my heroes, and I told him how worried I was about
• 35:55
  my particular child's risk factors and the fact that we
• 35:57
  moved her during this particularly risky time.
• 35:59
  And he said, Jess, I feel like I shouldn't have to remind you
• 36:02
  that one of the main purposes of adolescence and the adolescent
• 36:08
  brain development that's going on is to seek out novelty.
• 36:11
  And every time you achieve something new, every time you
• 36:14
  learn a new skill, every time you go out there and become
• 36:17
  competent in something new, which is what adolescents are
• 36:21
  driven to do naturally, you not only get that wonderful hit of
• 36:26
  dopamine, but you build your sense of competence and self
• 36:29
  efficacy and mastery. And that's really great.
• 36:32
  So you can choose to keep framing this as a negative as
• 36:36
  risk, risk, risk, risk, which you're definitely transmitting
• 36:39
  to your kid. Or you could choose use this as
• 36:42
  an opportunity to think about like what novel experiences can
• 36:47
  I push her toward to help her develop more competence and more
• 36:50
  mastery and more feelings of self efficacy.
• 36:52
  And just to define my term, self efficacy is the feeling, the
• 36:57
  understanding that something around you is not the way you
• 37:00
  want it to be. This relationship isn't working
• 37:02
  for me. My teacher doesn't like me.
• 37:05
  Whatever and feeling like if you take believing that if you take
• 37:10
  action that you can affect change.
• 37:12
  It's like a cross between like hope and competence.
• 37:16
  Self efficacy is the belief that I that my world whatever can be
• 37:21
  better and that I have the power to change it if I take action.
• 37:24
  And kids who ended up in my rehab classroom, I taught in a
• 37:28
  rehab for adolescence for five years.
• 37:30
  The kids in my rehab classroom all had incredibly low levels of
• 37:34
  self efficacy. Like, why bother?
• 37:36
  Why bother staying sober? Like nothing in my world is
• 37:39
  going to change. I can't, I can't affect change
• 37:41
  in my life. I'm stuck in this group home.
• 37:43
  I have abusive parents. I don't know where my next meals
• 37:46
  coming from. And none of that comes down to,
• 37:49
  you know, my ability to change anything.
• 37:51
  So the more self efficacy we can give kids, the better.
• 37:54
  That was a very long winded answer.
• 37:56
  To your no, no, no, I I'm loving it, I'm loving it.
• 37:58
  I may, I'm like writing notes down everywhere.
• 38:00
  And then the other question that I wanted to pull out of that
• 38:02
  first thing that you said is, you know, you were talking about
• 38:05
  the sips and giving the sips of alcohol and it's proven to not
• 38:09
  actually be a great thing at all.
• 38:10
  And So what about the parents who've already done that?
• 38:14
  What if we're what if we're doing this?
• 38:16
  Yes, like myself, obviously. This is why I want to know.
• 38:20
  What about the parents who've already said, oh, a couple sips
• 38:22
  here? You know you, you know you.
• 38:24
  You're going to be responsible about it though.
• 38:26
  This is how we learn to be responsible.
• 38:27
  What do you do when you feel like you've already messed the
• 38:30
  whole thing up? The entire premise of The Gift
• 38:33
  of Failure is that we do the best we can.
• 38:37
  This is what we want to model for kids and teach kids.
• 38:40
  We do the best we can with the information we have and if we
• 38:44
  learn how to do better, we say we apologize if we need to or
• 38:49
  we, you know, explain if we need to and then we move forward with
• 38:53
  the new information doing better.
• 38:55
  So yes, my eldest was allowed sips.
• 38:58
  I put some wine on his tongue. Excuse me, I think as a baby
• 39:02
  because it was a really nice bottle of wine and I figured,
• 39:04
  you know, he the first taste of wine should be this really nice
• 39:07
  bottle of wine. So what I did, and really who it
• 39:11
  affected was my daughter because she was still in the house.
• 39:14
  My son was off at college at the time, I think, or yeah, at
• 39:18
  college. And for my daughter, you know,
• 39:21
  it kind of, she felt it was a little unfair for her because
• 39:24
  the rules changed. And I didn't just RIP the carpet
• 39:27
  out from under her and say, RIP the rug out from under and say,
• 39:30
  you know, hi, ha ha, new rules. What I did was teach her what I
• 39:34
  know about the adolescent brain and the damage and the risk
• 39:39
  factors and the statistics and said, and therefore the rule in
• 39:46
  this house is no open containers in our house like sitting around
• 39:51
  because that's what my husband does for me.
• 39:53
  Just as a because he cares about me and he doesn't want me to
• 39:56
  have to think about an open container.
• 39:57
  So if he has a beer with dinner, he finishes it or pours the rest
• 40:01
  out and. No, you can't use drugs or
• 40:06
  alcohol until your brain is done developing because you know what
• 40:10
  I know? And here's all this great
• 40:12
  information on that you need to have in order to make good
• 40:16
  decisions. And did it feel a little unfair?
• 40:19
  Maybe. But and then there were all
• 40:20
  kinds of things I was worried about.
• 40:21
  Like, am I just, you know, she had a she had a friend come home
• 40:28
  for Thanksgiving from college with her one year.
• 40:31
  And this friend lives in a country somewhere else where the
• 40:34
  drinking age is 18. So we're having my my husband
• 40:39
  and my dad are having a little champagne.
• 40:41
  My mom doesn't drink, I don't drink.
• 40:44
  My eldest has been drinking age for a bunch of years.
• 40:48
  And so when it came to pouring champagne glasses, I said to the
• 40:52
  friend, I said, I'm, you know, I know this is a little weird
• 40:55
  because the drinking age in your country is 18.
• 40:57
  But in this house, we don't drink until we're above the
• 41:01
  legal age. And therefore your brain is
• 41:04
  she's done developing. I was petrified about this.
• 41:06
  And you could see the tension in my daughters face.
• 41:09
  She's like, is this gonna be weird?
• 41:10
  Oh my God. Oh my God, my mom is such a
• 41:12
  freak. And I was like, the kid was
• 41:15
  like, okay, it just wasn't a deal.
• 41:19
  It wasn't, it wasn't a deal. I don't know.
• 41:23
  Maybe there was lots of talk back at the college once they
• 41:26
  were back there about what a freak Phoebe's mom is.
• 41:29
  But. But I don't care.
• 41:32
  That's our rule, you know? And I would love to be the fun,
• 41:35
  you know, we all want to be like the, the fun cool parent with
• 41:40
  the cool hangout house. And wouldn't it be more likely
• 41:43
  the kids would hang out at our house if we were a little more
• 41:45
  LAX about drugs and alcohol, especially since, you know, weed
• 41:50
  is legal in this state? Yeah, maybe.
• 41:52
  But you know, I'm sorry, the risk to my kids is just too
• 41:56
  high. But given their genetics, and
• 41:58
  given what I know about the adolescent brain and substance
• 42:02
  use, it just is. Quick pause because if you're
• 42:05
  listening to Roar, I have a feeling you're exactly the kind
• 42:08
  of person I write for. I send out a sub stack
• 42:10
  newsletter where I go a little deeper, more personal stories,
• 42:13
  behind the scenes thoughts, and honestly some of the things we
• 42:16
  don't always say out loud here. If you want to stay connected
• 42:19
  between episodes, you can find it at Roar with
• 42:22
  danielledavies.substack.com. I'd love to have you there.
• 42:26
  And now back to your regularly scheduled podcast.
• 42:31
  How do you like, why am I not finding the word?
• 42:36
  I don't know menopause, The how do you find the middle ground
• 42:39
  between, you know, having a house where you're like, I am so
• 42:43
  off topic, but having a house, but I need to know how do you
• 42:46
  have between, you know, being the house where you're like,
• 42:49
  we're not going to drink until our brains are fully developed
• 42:52
  And the fact that sometimes, you know, I'm constantly like, you
• 42:56
  will not text and drive. You will not text and drive,
• 42:58
  right? Seeing driving is bad.
• 43:00
  You're a danger. Then I find out my kid texted
• 43:02
  and drove and I'm like, you know, I, I lose my mind.
• 43:06
  So sometimes they're going to do what I don't want them to do.
• 43:09
  They're going to, we're going to go against my wisdom and I
• 43:13
  always am like I'm the house. I will pick you up.
• 43:16
  I will not ask any questions because I would rather obviously
• 43:20
  they live through through their mistake.
• 43:22
  How do you kind of find that middle ground?
• 43:25
  So taking there's, I compare it to Here's what we don't want to
• 43:30
  do. What we don't want to do is use
• 43:33
  like language from purity culture of like my husband grew
• 43:37
  up in Utah and he a lot of the girls he grew up with, we're
• 43:41
  told something to the equivalent of losing your virginity makes
• 43:45
  you like a used piece of gum. No one's going to want to chew
• 43:49
  on that used piece of gum if you've lost your virginity.
• 43:51
  So that's what we don't want. We don't want this all or
• 43:53
  nothing for, let alone that that's all made-up BS, whatever.
• 43:59
  What we do want is for kids to understand that, yeah, we, we
• 44:03
  screw up. Like this is a really important
• 44:06
  message also in the recovery world, because in for
• 44:08
  adolescents who are recovering, relapse is just part of it.
• 44:13
  Like they just do relapse. The, the number of kid people
• 44:16
  who get sober young and never relapse is really small.
• 44:21
  So what we need kids to understand is that's not, that's
• 44:27
  not a fatal error. A friend that I've been sort of,
• 44:31
  I text back and forth with, I sort of helped them get to a
• 44:34
  place where they knew they needed to get better and, and
• 44:36
  stop drinking. And they relapsed a lot at the
• 44:39
  beginning. And they were always ashamed.
• 44:42
  But they would text me and I would say, OK, what'd we learn?
• 44:45
  What did we learn from this relapse?
• 44:47
  Like you, you know, you feel like you've just lost
• 44:51
  everything, but you haven't, you learned so much in the interim,
• 44:55
  let alone you learned what it feels like when you move toward
• 44:59
  a relapse so that you can maybe now build some skills to sort of
• 45:02
  intercept, intercept those thoughts that weird, like many
• 45:06
  of us find that we were in our our addicted brain way before we
• 45:11
  ever pick up that first drink to relapse or that first whatever.
• 45:15
  So for kids, it's really important for them to understand
• 45:17
  that to come at it without judgment because what we really,
• 45:21
  really need is to keep keep communication going.
• 45:24
  We do not want to shut down communication.
• 45:26
  So this is not OK. But I love you.
• 45:29
  I support you. Thank you for making a really
• 45:31
  good decision about calling me like that means the world to me.
• 45:35
  I would much rather you make this mistake and yet, and trust
• 45:39
  me and your safety so that we keep having this conversation.
• 45:43
  But this is not a fatal flaw. You're not like ruined now.
• 45:49
  It just means we're going to try to take what we learned from
• 45:51
  this experience to try to do better next time.
• 45:54
  And you know, if if they're really talking to you, which
• 45:58
  would be great and both the gift of failure and the addiction
• 46:01
  inoculation talk a lot about keeping communication going.
• 46:05
  There's also a wonderful book by Robin Silverman called talk to
• 46:09
  kids about any how to talk to kids about anything.
• 46:11
  And she includes a whole bunch in there about, you know, all
• 46:14
  the normal things that are really hard to talk to kids
• 46:16
  about. There's a couple of great books
• 46:19
  on that. Making sure that you're
• 46:23
  preserving the communication is super important because that's
• 46:26
  their lifeline to you. And even in college, college
• 46:32
  kids report that they still trust their parents advice
• 46:36
  around health decision making. And this falls under decision
• 46:40
  making around health. So and my favorite part,
• 46:43
  frankly, of the gift of the addiction inoculation isn't
• 46:46
  technically one that I came up with on my own.
• 46:49
  I asked a whole bunch of young adults and adolescents to give
• 46:53
  me their favorite excuses that they use when they don't want to
• 46:57
  use or drink at a party or when they're out or one with their
• 47:01
  friends. And, and, and not feel like a
• 47:06
  big dweeb. And so there's like 2 1/2 pages
• 47:08
  of these excuses that kids came to me with for, you know,
• 47:12
  understanding that no is a complete sentence.
• 47:14
  And that's cool. But other excuses that they've
• 47:17
  used or could use that they've sort of loaded up for if they
• 47:21
  don't want to lose face, but they also just don't want to
• 47:23
  use. And it's, they're really good.
• 47:26
  They're really cool. That is awesome.
• 47:28
  I, I, well, first of all, I'd love to see that.
• 47:30
  And it's funny because I actually have a college reunion
• 47:32
  coming up this summer and everybody's like, we're going to
• 47:36
  go here and we're going to go there and it's walking distance
• 47:38
  to the bars. You know, I'm like, I, I and
• 47:42
  it's actually, and I, I'm actually like thinking in my
• 47:44
  head, do I say I don't drink? Do I just not drink?
• 47:47
  I just, it's, it's interesting because it comes up no matter
• 47:49
  what your age like and especially for kids.
• 47:52
  Yeah, it came up on threads just the other day.
• 47:54
  Someone said, what do you say when you don't want to drink?
• 47:58
  And all these people had like these cryptic whatever.
• 48:01
  I'm like, I just say I'm an alcoholic, you know, and then
• 48:04
  but I also don't want, you know, for me, it's just I've, you have
• 48:09
  to understand if you read addiction inoculation, you
• 48:11
  understand that I was raised in a household with someone with
• 48:15
  substance use disorder where we were not allowed to talk about
• 48:17
  it. In fact, we were gas lit.
• 48:19
  We were told that what we were seeing was not what we were
• 48:22
  seeing. And I think that has put in me
• 48:26
  this need to be really honest and also recovery.
• 48:30
  You have to be really honest when you're a recovery.
• 48:32
  And I'm not saying that means you go out there and you make
• 48:34
  other people feel uncomfortable. But for me, every single time
• 48:37
  I've ever in public said that I'm an alcoholic or that I'm in
• 48:40
  recovery, that has led to at least one conversation.
• 48:44
  And sometimes way down the road, someone remembers, oh, that that
• 48:48
  just like he, that author person I saw at that thing and she gave
• 48:51
  us our e-mail or I could find her on her website.
• 48:53
  I'm just going to reach out to her.
• 48:55
  And there are a bunch of conversations that I'm having
• 48:57
  with people right now who through text or e-mail that just
• 49:02
  reached out and some of them aren't ready to say why they've
• 49:04
  reached out yet, but I know why they reached out.
• 49:07
  The person I was talking about who kept relapsing, he texted me
• 49:11
  or DM Ed me through social media of someone I knew from my
• 49:15
  childhood for, I don't know, two years before he finally admitted
• 49:21
  that the reason he had reached out to me was that he knew he
• 49:23
  needed to stop and he just didn't know how.
• 49:27
  And then two years in, he was finally ready.
• 49:30
  And that's, you know, that's an incredible honor for me being
• 49:34
  really honest about that has been and I feel like as a white
• 49:39
  woman of privilege. And, you know, there are so many
• 49:44
  people who can't say it. It's just another strike against
• 49:47
  them. Like if I was a single mom of
• 49:51
  color, like so many people might hold that against me.
• 49:55
  And it's, and I feel like if I can make it easier for someone
• 49:59
  for whom saying that they have substance use disorder is a
• 50:03
  massive hurdle for them. I'm going to keep saying it
• 50:06
  until it's OK for everybody to say it.
• 50:08
  It it. If it's OK for me, then I need
• 50:11
  to be saying it more and more and more so that I can pave the
• 50:15
  way for other people to be able to say it.
• 50:17
  I feel like, you know, so much of your work is obviously for
• 50:20
  the next generation. You're thinking about children
• 50:23
  and raising them in your history as an educator and as a parent
• 50:26
  and, and all of this, it's, it's to pay it forward, right?
• 50:30
  These kids, you want to, we want to do our Best Buy them.
• 50:32
  But it's also you're helping the original people, the parents
• 50:37
  that the generation who's could do better or worse or could, you
• 50:41
  know, learn from our mistakes, I feel.
• 50:43
  Like, and it's, it's a real thing in a family because if, if
• 50:46
  my kids and my niece's, let's say hypothetically, none of them
• 50:50
  end up developing substance use disorder.
• 50:54
  Like it doesn't mean that it's not in their genetics or their
• 50:57
  epigenetics, but it does mean that that's been interrupted,
• 51:00
  right? So I grew up with someone with
• 51:02
  substance use disorder and it was not fun.
• 51:05
  It was not a good thing. But at least for my niece's,
• 51:09
  because my sister does not have substance use disorder, at least
• 51:12
  for my niece's and for my kids, that's been interrupted because
• 51:15
  I got better when my kids were fairly young.
• 51:18
  So they have not had to witness an alcoholic parent, right.
• 51:23
  So, and by the way, and I'm going to borrow this in the
• 51:28
  borrow it in the sense that I am so intrigued and respected and
• 51:31
  hopefully not in a sense of cultural appropriation, but I
• 51:34
  get to learn so much when I go to these big conferences about
• 51:38
  substance use prevention and recovery.
• 51:39
  And I just came home from 1:00 one of those conferences and
• 51:43
  they were talking about recovery in tribal and indigenous
• 51:46
  communities. And recovery there looks a
• 51:50
  little bit different from recovery for someone like me,
• 51:54
  because what they're trying to do there is make people whole
• 51:59
  again. And that includes returning them
• 52:01
  to their culture. And they have a real belief
• 52:03
  around, they have this seven generation idea that the things
• 52:08
  we're trying to do today will affect people 7 generations
• 52:11
  down. And this substance use
• 52:14
  prevention cannot be like we cannot have a short, we can't
• 52:19
  have a short term lens. That's not even how you say
• 52:22
  that, but this is something that changes slowly over time.
• 52:26
  But look how far we've come. I mean substance use, if you
• 52:29
  look at the, I have all these tables of statistics around like
• 52:32
  lifetime abstaining from drugs and alcohol and past month use
• 52:38
  and all that sort of stuff for adolescents.
• 52:41
  We are, we have been in a / a decade long decline in substance
• 52:46
  use among adolescents, not so much emerging adults, but among
• 52:51
  adolescents. And that's because we know
• 52:54
  prevention works. But ten years ago it would have
• 52:57
  been, you know, if we look just at each year's incremental
• 52:59
  change, that's frustrating. We got to look over longer
• 53:02
  periods of time, whether that's 7 generations and I love that
• 53:05
  idea or whether that's just interrupting it with my
• 53:09
  generation so that my kids, kids can have a better shot at not
• 53:14
  developing substance use disorder during their lifetime.
• 53:16
  We have to be thinking head, this has got to be about them.
• 53:20
  Do you think that it's helpful that there are so many at first
• 53:23
  of all, there's like this whole sober curious moment going on.
• 53:26
  And I think that's great. But I also so my sister, who
• 53:30
  won't mind that I'm sharing this is an addict.
• 53:32
  And so she's been in recovery for years and she can't.
• 53:37
  OK. And I just, I don't drink, but
• 53:41
  our reasons for this are very different.
• 53:43
  So I didn't really have a, a problem, so to speak.
• 53:47
  I felt like it added to my anxiety.
• 53:49
  And I was like, you know what? This is just not helpful in my
• 53:51
  life, so I'm just gonna knock it off.
• 53:52
  And that was that. My sister, however, had a
• 53:55
  problem with it. And so she through struggle,
• 53:58
  stopped having a problem with it, which just stopped using it
• 54:02
  always has a problem. But there's a lot of mocktails
• 54:05
  on the market, right? And I love a mocktail.
• 54:09
  I'm like, and I and it, it kind of gives you that sense of it's
• 54:14
  almost like if you're drinking a decaf coffee, you're not really,
• 54:16
  you're not. It's the, it's the act of it.
• 54:19
  It's the ritual of I'm going to sit down and have this, this
• 54:22
  warm drink. And so I love a mocktail for
• 54:25
  that, that feeling, whereas my sister is like, I'm not having a
• 54:30
  mocktail because that feeling is nothing I should be near ever in
• 54:34
  my life. Do you see that in any way
• 54:36
  helping or hurting? How, how, what do you think of
• 54:39
  that? I'm just curious.
• 54:41
  The evidence on that is really not clear.
• 54:43
  We don't have great studies on it.
• 54:45
  It's really an individual thing. So for me, mocktails.
• 54:50
  So I did a lot of my drinking while I was preparing dinner
• 54:54
  when before my husband was home, so I could get a really good
• 54:57
  buzz on before he ever got home. So for me, drinking something
• 55:02
  fancy while making dinner is a thing for me.
• 55:07
  So now I, I live on, I have a very, very, very small farm
• 55:13
  slash very humongous garden and I make a lot of like syrups,
• 55:17
  Berry Berry syrups and things like that.
• 55:20
  And I, I am a massive seltzer drinker.
• 55:23
  So put something fizzy with the Berry syrup.
• 55:26
  That's my fancy drink. That's really important to me.
• 55:28
  On the other hand, I also I'm a big non alcoholic beer fan.
• 55:32
  I, you know, for me, that's, I've been sober now for almost
• 55:36
  14 years. So far that has not been a
• 55:40
  trigger for me. It scratches the itch of I like
• 55:43
  the taste of beer. I love the taste of a fancy sort
• 55:46
  of mixed thing. And I totally appreciate the
• 55:50
  fact that a lot of restaurants are, are developing mocktails.
• 55:53
  It's fantastic, but if you a lot of people, especially people in
• 55:58
  12 step recovery are like absolutely not mocktails, non
• 56:02
  alcoholic beer, that is the thin end of a wedge.
• 56:05
  I think there are, there are a lot of fights between factions
• 56:12
  in recovery and the reality is it really comes down to what you
• 56:19
  know about yourself and staying sober.
• 56:21
  The problem is, is that I know that my brain is broken when it
• 56:24
  comes to using substances. So I mean, maybe I've been
• 56:28
  tricking myself for 14 years about whether or not I can have
• 56:31
  non alcoholic beer. But, and my, I also have a
• 56:34
  spouse who keeps a super close eye on me because because, and
• 56:39
  he's very careful and he's very conscientious about, like I
• 56:44
  said, about having open containers.
• 56:46
  They just, that's not a thing in our house.
• 56:48
  So it's a very individual decision with the caveat that we
• 56:54
  have to be really careful because our judgement about what
• 56:57
  is getting us in trouble and what's not getting us in trouble
• 56:59
  can be broken sometimes. Yeah, I was just curious about
• 57:02
  that because it's it. They're everywhere now, which?
• 57:05
  Which to me is a. Well, and that leads to the
• 57:07
  second-half of this, which is I, what's been really cool, what's
• 57:11
  been really amazing is for millennials, Gen.
• 57:14
  Z's, it has been much, much more acceptable to choose sobriety.
• 57:20
  And not even just not even sobriety, but just not really
• 57:23
  into drinking just because it's a choice that they're allowed to
• 57:27
  make as opposed to, oh, I have a problem, I have to stop
• 57:30
  drinking. Lots and lots of kids are
• 57:32
  telling me it's just a choice that they've decided to make
• 57:35
  because they're learning more. You know, it's only been in the
• 57:37
  last generation that we've been able to look inside the human,
• 57:40
  the human brain while it's working and know what's
• 57:43
  happening in there. And so all this information we
• 57:45
  have about what alcohol and drugs do to the human brain and
• 57:49
  especially what they do, the adolescent brain, this is all
• 57:53
  new information. And as it trickles down to the
• 57:56
  people whose brains are concerned and the decisions they
• 57:59
  make around drugs and alcohol, you know, if you know that using
• 58:03
  weed on a regular basis can render it can make it so that
• 58:07
  your hippocampus is smaller than it would be in, for example,
• 58:11
  that we know that the hippocampus, which is right
• 58:14
  where the receptors are for the cannabinoids, the active
• 58:19
  ingredient in weed, we know that those kids tend to have smaller
• 58:23
  hippocampuses. And hippocampus is the seat of
• 58:26
  memory formation and consolidation.
• 58:28
  And there's a reason that people on weed have bad short term
• 58:30
  memory and it's because of that proximity to the hippocampus.
• 58:33
  So if I tell a kid who has big goals for her future around, I
• 58:39
  don't know, going to Med school and having to learn a ton of
• 58:42
  stuff, and I tell her that if she is a regular user of weed,
• 58:45
  her short term memory just won't be as good, that can be a really
• 58:49
  important lever for helping kids understand that.
• 58:51
  And so a lot of kids are now that they're beginning to
• 58:53
  understand that schools are working really hard to get that
• 58:56
  information down to them. They can make more informed
• 59:00
  decisions and they are, they are making more informed decisions.
• 59:03
  They just are. I'm seeing it over and over and
• 59:05
  over again. And the surveys, risk surveys we
• 59:08
  see tell us the same thing. It's awesome to think of.
• 59:12
  And you're right too. You know, just thinking back
• 59:14
  anecdotally to being a, you know, I graduated high school in
• 59:17
  1992. You didn't, it wasn't if you
• 59:20
  were at a party, you drank a beer.
• 59:22
  It wasn't. There was somebody who opted
• 59:25
  out. You just didn't go.
• 59:26
  So if you wanted to be in the social setting, you did what you
• 59:30
  did in the social setting. Whereas now I do think that the
• 59:33
  kids are, they're so they're coming so much further along,
• 59:35
  thank goodness. Like they, I feel like leaps and
• 59:38
  bounds. You know, I watch my kids and
• 59:39
  I'm like, my God, you do so many more impressive or you handle
• 59:44
  yourself in AI mean not all the time.
• 59:46
  By the way, I just want to give that caveat every so often my
• 59:49
  husband's like will they ever not make stupid decisions?
• 59:53
  I'm like, well, not yet. They're about 25.
• 59:55
  When their frontal lobe is done developing and they've they're
• 59:58
  filled in, yes, they. Will I?
• 1:00:00
  Actually, yes. Go ahead from a Since your
• 1:00:03
  podcast is for women, I just want to make sure that we cover
• 1:00:06
  a few things about women and alcohol, please #1 We are
• 1:00:10
  lacking an enzyme that allows us to breakdown alcohol as
• 1:00:14
  efficiently as it breaks down in men's bodies.
• 1:00:16
  So all other things being equal, which it's really hard to make
• 1:00:19
  all other things being equal because our bodies are built
• 1:00:22
  different proportions of muscle to fat.
• 1:00:25
  So water, more water content in men's bodies than in women's
• 1:00:29
  bodies. So we automatically are breaking
• 1:00:31
  down alcohol more slowly, but we're also missing this enzyme.
• 1:00:34
  So we break down more slowly. Girls, women who drink in order
• 1:00:39
  to manage anxiety. Which is very much why I drank
• 1:00:43
  because I drank in the evening, because I had trouble falling
• 1:00:46
  asleep because of my anxiety which ha ha jokes on me, alcohol
• 1:00:51
  make anxiety worse. Also you will wake up.
• 1:00:56
  Let me just pipe in yes. Yes, you will wake up around
• 1:01:00
  2:30 or 3:00 in the morning having an anxiety attack and
• 1:01:05
  that's because alcohol messes with your sleep.
• 1:01:08
  Sleep and drugs and alcohol have a bi directional effect on each
• 1:01:13
  other. People who get too little sleep
• 1:01:15
  tend to use more drugs and alcohol.
• 1:01:16
  People who use more drugs and alcohol tend to get too little
• 1:01:19
  sleep. So that's all important to know.
• 1:01:22
  But if women drink in order to manage their anxiety, they are
• 1:01:27
  more likely than not to develop substance use disorder.
• 1:01:33
  So if you are drinking to manage your anxiety, not only does that
• 1:01:36
  not work, it feels like it works in the short term.
• 1:01:39
  It works so great in the short term.
• 1:01:41
  This is as so many things with drugs and alcohol.
• 1:01:43
  It works until it doesn't work anymore.
• 1:01:45
  And when it doesn't work anymore, it's awful.
• 1:01:49
  And also, you're just if you're drinking to manage anxiety,
• 1:01:53
  you're more likely than not to start having a problem, to
• 1:01:56
  become a problem drinker, to have a problem with alcohol, to
• 1:01:58
  start misusing alcohol, to use all of the euphemisms.
• 1:02:03
  Anecdotal story here when you just said that my SO my sister's
• 1:02:06
  drug of choice was heroin for a while and God I hope that was OK
• 1:02:11
  to say. Anyway, the point is she
• 1:02:13
  actually, well, not. Great for anxiety either,
• 1:02:15
  although no. But but OK, so my sister all all
• 1:02:18
  my my children were very little and my sister was a young mom.
• 1:02:22
  This is when it all happened. She was the most she was fun
• 1:02:27
  Aunt Michelle. She was so much fun and my kids
• 1:02:30
  like they were like all and she'll watch us.
• 1:02:33
  I mean, I would come home, she would have them out and they
• 1:02:35
  would have sharpie written all over them.
• 1:02:37
  I'm like, there's a million kids markers.
• 1:02:40
  Why would you put sharpie? Why would you let them?
• 1:02:42
  You know, she just but she was so much fun.
• 1:02:44
  She's making tunnels, she's making four.
• 1:02:46
  She's so relaxed and I'm like barrel of nerves.
• 1:02:51
  Welcome to find out she's on heroin and and she's on.
• 1:02:55
  Also, they're not her kids. That's just, I don't know, she
• 1:02:58
  grandkids. That's why grandkids are so much
• 1:03:01
  more fun than your own kids. Because they're not your kids.
• 1:03:03
  You can give them back you don't have to deal with.
• 1:03:04
  Well, she had her. Kid there too.
• 1:03:06
  She had her child there too. I do have to give her credit,
• 1:03:08
  but but the the point is that once she stopped using drugs and
• 1:03:12
  she had to contend with being a sober parent, I was like, we are
• 1:03:18
  very, we are actually very similar.
• 1:03:20
  Like I didn't know all the because her, her addiction
• 1:03:24
  started so young and we didn't realize that this was part.
• 1:03:27
  We assumed it was her personality, but it wasn't.
• 1:03:30
  It was this addiction. And so it turns out that she's
• 1:03:33
  actually pretty anxious. Also.
• 1:03:35
  She's, you know, got her own set of anxieties and this was a
• 1:03:38
  coping mechanism. And she actually said at one
• 1:03:39
  point when I was saying that I was on anxiety and I was being
• 1:03:43
  treated for anxiety and she's like, oh, don't use heroin
• 1:03:48
  because it really, you know, it's like really helps at 1st.
• 1:03:52
  And I was like, I'm not going to, I was like, I was just, you
• 1:03:56
  know, thinking possibly Zoloft, but I'm not going to jump to
• 1:03:59
  that. But it's just interesting
• 1:04:01
  because anyway, that was my anecdotal, but it didn't
• 1:04:04
  obviously doesn't work these. Things and and when our kids see
• 1:04:09
  us not coping with our anxiety in a healthy way, then they're
• 1:04:14
  less likely to cope with their anxiety and healthy way.
• 1:04:16
  And on top of all of that, you have to remember one of the
• 1:04:20
  important things to remember about people who start using
• 1:04:23
  drugs and alcohol when they're really young is this is a bit of
• 1:04:26
  an overstatement, but also kind of generally true is that their
• 1:04:30
  coping mechanisms and development their their
• 1:04:35
  emotional development gets arrested at the age pretty much
• 1:04:38
  when they started using. So in the sense that they don't
• 1:04:43
  continue to they don't have coping mechanisms because the
• 1:04:46
  drugs have been their coping mechanism, right.
• 1:04:49
  So I could have learned so much more about managing my anxiety
• 1:04:53
  if I had gone to see a therapist and talked about my anxiety or
• 1:04:56
  had a regular mindfulness practice, which is why I talked
• 1:05:00
  about that in the addiction inoculation.
• 1:05:02
  You know, I tried to get my my daughter to do a mindfulness
• 1:05:05
  practice with me and she grudgingly did it with me and
• 1:05:09
  then basically referred to it as dumb.
• 1:05:12
  She didn't like it. But then I come to find out she
• 1:05:15
  developed her own mindfulness practice that she continues to
• 1:05:18
  this day. It's just it she needed the one
• 1:05:20
  that worked for her, not mine. So help giving kids, helping
• 1:05:25
  guide kids toward healthier outlets for whatever it is
• 1:05:29
  they're feeling and wanting to self medicate is one of the most
• 1:05:32
  important things that we can do. And they're not going to like we
• 1:05:35
  don't like give them a solution. They're like, oh, thanks mom,
• 1:05:38
  yes, I'm going to go use your solution in order to manage my
• 1:05:41
  issues. But they're at least seeing us
• 1:05:43
  doing some of the problem solving about how to manage our
• 1:05:46
  stuff or giving them ideas or giving them a starting place to
• 1:05:49
  think about, Like the mindfulness thing.
• 1:05:51
  Like, and that wasn't her favorite way to do it, but she
• 1:05:55
  has a different favorite way to do a mindfulness practice.
• 1:05:58
  And it's become incredibly important to her.
• 1:06:00
  And it does not resemble mine at all.
• 1:06:02
  But yay that she has one. Absolutely.
• 1:06:06
  And all of this. Well, first, I know you said you
• 1:06:10
  had something else to say about women.
• 1:06:11
  I didn't know if you if I cut you.
• 1:06:13
  Off That was it. That was pretty much all of it.
• 1:06:15
  Oh no, one last thing. So I hey, just finished
• 1:06:19
  treatment for breast cancer and we know drinking raises the risk
• 1:06:24
  of breast cancer. So when I talked to my nieces
• 1:06:28
  about substance use prevention, you know, I talked a lot about
• 1:06:33
  their genetics and we talked a lot about traumatic things that
• 1:06:37
  have happened to them and the fact that, you know, it can be
• 1:06:40
  really tempting to manage those things you don't want to think
• 1:06:43
  about with drugs and alcohol. I don't know if my drinking
• 1:06:47
  caused my breast cancer. We can't know that.
• 1:06:51
  But isn't it interesting that I drank and I ended up with breast
• 1:06:54
  cancer? And it's just, if we think about
• 1:06:58
  the way kids make decisions, they tend to, when people say
• 1:07:02
  adolescents don't make good, don't understand the
• 1:07:04
  consequences of their actions, that is not true at all.
• 1:07:07
  What we do know about adolescent decision making is they tend to
• 1:07:10
  weigh the possible positive benefits of a decision heavier
• 1:07:15
  than the possible negative outcomes of a decision.
• 1:07:18
  So it's on us to help them, you know, understand the actual,
• 1:07:23
  real risks, whether that's their genetics, whether that's they
• 1:07:26
  have a hockey tournament tomorrow and they're going to
• 1:07:29
  feel really crappy when they wake up for that 5:00 AM, you
• 1:07:32
  know, report to the hockey rink thing or, you know, geez, breast
• 1:07:36
  cancer is also one of those things floating out there.
• 1:07:38
  And I know that alcohol is a carcinogen and can and can
• 1:07:41
  increase risk for breast cancer. I don't care as long as I'm
• 1:07:44
  being honest about the risk factors and it's coming from a
• 1:07:47
  place of evidence. I'm going to put as much out
• 1:07:50
  there as I can to help kids way, you know, really think about
• 1:07:54
  that possible negative outcome side.
• 1:07:57
  Definitely, because while it may not have caused your breast
• 1:08:00
  cancer, it certainly doesn't help, right?
• 1:08:02
  It's not it's a poison. We're anyway, I'm sorry but but
• 1:08:07
  I think that's the. Other thing I think that's
• 1:08:09
  that's going to become a much bigger part of the conversation,
• 1:08:13
  the more we understand about the damage that this drug does just
• 1:08:20
  from the moment it enters our mouth to our throat and the
• 1:08:24
  caustic effect it has on our throat.
• 1:08:26
  Like throat cancer only happens mainly only happens in people
• 1:08:30
  who smoke and drink because those two things together really
• 1:08:34
  make the throat vulnerable to the carcinogens in both tobacco
• 1:08:38
  and, and you know, all that sort of stuff.
• 1:08:40
  So, you know, there are, we're going to look, I think the next
• 1:08:44
  20 years is, I think we're, I hope that in terms of marketing
• 1:08:51
  to kids, in terms of marketing alcohol, in terms of
• 1:08:54
  understanding the real risks of the human body around alcohol, I
• 1:08:57
  think we're in a bit of a big tobacco moment with alcohol.
• 1:09:01
  We'll see. I'm hopeful, but I just want
• 1:09:04
  people to have the right information.
• 1:09:05
  I don't want them to look at scandal and say that's how you
• 1:09:09
  deal with your bad day at work. I want them to have at least a
• 1:09:12
  balanced understanding of the risk to a woman's body.
• 1:09:19
  That's maybe not due to that one massive glass of, by the way,
• 1:09:24
  the glasses I had for wine towards the end of my drinking,
• 1:09:28
  I could fit most of a bottle of wine.
• 1:09:29
  I don't know if you've ever seen the Amy Schumer.
• 1:09:32
  It's a satire on Friday Night Lights and the wine glass starts
• 1:09:37
  out like this big, but by the end she's got a wine glass that
• 1:09:40
  she's kind of got a hold with both arms because.
• 1:09:43
  That's. Awesome, because the the wife
• 1:09:45
  and that the woman, the male female lead in that show drank
• 1:09:48
  so much alcohol, so much wine. I just want a balanced view and
• 1:09:53
  and for kids especially, I want them to be able to make good
• 1:09:56
  decisions. And if marketing is shouting at
• 1:09:58
  them really, really loud about all the possible benefits of
• 1:10:01
  having this brand a beer, you can look like this.
• 1:10:03
  You can be on the beach having a bonfire and have great looking
• 1:10:06
  girlfriend or boyfriend and all that stuff.
• 1:10:08
  I at least want to give them the other side of that same coin and
• 1:10:12
  explain how they're being manipulated by the media.
• 1:10:15
  Explain how they're being manipulated by brands and what
• 1:10:17
  their brand loyalty is worth in dollars to that company because
• 1:10:21
  it's a lot. All of these things I just want
• 1:10:24
  them to have, you know, I've spent my entire adult life
• 1:10:28
  working with kids and I just want them to have the best
• 1:10:30
  information possible to make the best decisions they can so they
• 1:10:34
  can make it to adulthood with their brains and their mental
• 1:10:37
  health intact. And I don't think as parents,
• 1:10:40
  there's anything we want more than that.
• 1:10:41
  But this is the last thing I wanted to ask you.
• 1:10:43
  You know, so much what? First of all, you're obviously
• 1:10:45
  highly educated in this field. You've done all your research,
• 1:10:48
  you know, all these things. You can talk about it backwards
• 1:10:51
  and forwards, which is awesome. For a lot of people who aren't
• 1:10:55
  educated in this, it might seem they're, you know, there are
• 1:10:59
  people in the grind of their life, whatever their life is, if
• 1:11:03
  they're driving a truck or they're maybe a cleaning person
• 1:11:06
  and this isn't necessarily what they're thinking.
• 1:11:09
  They're they're getting through. They're thinking about dinner
• 1:11:11
  and how are we going to do this and we're paying the bills.
• 1:11:13
  Or it, it seems like it requires a lot of self-awareness and self
• 1:11:19
  introspection even to say, Hey, I don't, I hate the term
• 1:11:23
  helicopter mom, which my son always calls me and I'm like, I
• 1:11:26
  am in New Jersey and you're in Hawaii automatically that takes
• 1:11:29
  that away from me. Like, I am definitely not a
• 1:11:32
  helicopter mom, but it, I just think it, it requires some
• 1:11:38
  self-awareness for us as adults. Do you have any recommendations
• 1:11:42
  about that? And I know this isn't
• 1:11:43
  necessarily your area of expertise, but how you step back
• 1:11:46
  to even get to the point where you're like, Hey, of course I
• 1:11:49
  want the best for my kids, but I've got, you know, I don't
• 1:11:53
  know, whatever your challenge is, everybody's got challenges.
• 1:11:56
  Whatever it is to step back enough to recognize, to look at
• 1:12:01
  yourself, whether it's your the alcoholism you're bringing to
• 1:12:04
  the table or if it's your sense of perfection and, you know,
• 1:12:09
  fixing them over fixing and and helping them.
• 1:12:12
  Do you have any suggestions for how you even get to that first
• 1:12:15
  step? To even, you know, pick your
• 1:12:17
  book up? Because it's, yeah, it's such.
• 1:12:19
  Valuable information in it when I, you know, we first hopped on
• 1:12:22
  the call before we recorded, I was like, Oh, I got stressed
• 1:12:26
  because what do I what do I want?
• 1:12:28
  I want the best for them and and any possible way that I have not
• 1:12:34
  provided the best for them will as an anxious person just
• 1:12:39
  continue to feel my anxiety. So I'm curious how you what your
• 1:12:43
  thoughts are on that. I said not so.
• 1:12:45
  What anxious mom? I think one of the hardest parts
• 1:12:49
  of, you know, my job is to teach people about this stuff and to
• 1:12:54
  be to get in the room. Sometimes I have to be a little
• 1:12:59
  tricky and talk about like, oh, this is a talk about learning in
• 1:13:01
  the brain gift of failure. But I'm going to sneak a little
• 1:13:04
  bit of substance use prevention in there because some people are
• 1:13:06
  just really resistant to it either because they have their
• 1:13:09
  own issues. Like I'm not going to a
• 1:13:10
  substance use prevention talk when I was drinking like that.
• 1:13:14
  That would make me the the shame and guilt would be too much.
• 1:13:17
  Lots of people say they don't want to come to my in person
• 1:13:20
  events because they're especially in their community
• 1:13:23
  because they don't. What if someone sees them and
• 1:13:25
  thinks, oh, she's worried about her son Sam?
• 1:13:27
  Like what about that? Or you know, whatever.
• 1:13:30
  So there's lots of hurdles to getting in the door to learn
• 1:13:33
  about this stuff. So I try to make it as easy as
• 1:13:35
  possible. So the book is out there.
• 1:13:38
  I read the audiobook version. If you want to listen to it in
• 1:13:40
  the car, listen to it with earbuds so no one can even and
• 1:13:43
  you can do other stuff while you listen to it.
• 1:13:45
  Then a friend of mine who I really respect, she I was
• 1:13:48
  lamenting how hard it is to get people to come and listen to
• 1:13:51
  talks about substance use prevention.
• 1:13:52
  Just like it's hard to get people to come to like how to
• 1:13:55
  have the sex talk or how to have the talk about porn or whatever.
• 1:14:00
  I started she's like, you don't mind doing video?
• 1:14:02
  So I started doing these 92nd videos that are on my Instagram
• 1:14:07
  reels but also indexed on my website because my friend was
• 1:14:10
  like, look, maybe people just want to consume this stuff
• 1:14:12
  privately and in very small chunks so it's not overwhelming.
• 1:14:16
  I'm like, great. So I made almost 400 videos
• 1:14:18
  about every aspect of the addiction, inoculation, gift of
• 1:14:22
  failure. And now I'm doing a whole series
• 1:14:24
  on student and parent questions. I don't care how you get the
• 1:14:29
  information. I just want you to have really
• 1:14:31
  good evidence based, research backed information.
• 1:14:34
  And so if you have an idea about another way to get it to people,
• 1:14:39
  toss it to me. I think the conversation is so
• 1:14:43
  important and yet so scary for so many people that to ease them
• 1:14:47
  into it. I mean, lately my entire
• 1:14:49
  marketing strategy strategy has been how do I get people to come
• 1:14:52
  to this who wouldn't normally come to this?
• 1:14:55
  And especially with schools who feel like they have a duty to
• 1:14:58
  get this information to parents and yet no one shows up.
• 1:15:02
  If it's a straight up substance use prevention talk, I'm fully
• 1:15:05
  willing to wheel in my Trojan horse like at a gift of failure
• 1:15:10
  talk and explain that one of the most important, like when I get
• 1:15:13
  to that competence section and explain the competence, self
• 1:15:16
  efficacy, mastery, all that stuff which is so important to
• 1:15:18
  gift a failure is also really important to substance use
• 1:15:21
  prevention. So I do a lot more virtual gigs
• 1:15:24
  so that people can register and be anonymous and just listen to
• 1:15:28
  it while they're cooking dinner or whatever.
• 1:15:32
  You know, we've had to get really creative about meeting
• 1:15:35
  people where they're at. And sometimes that means that,
• 1:15:40
  you know, I have to be a little sneaky to get in the door.
• 1:15:42
  But I'm willing to do that only because I feel like this is so
• 1:15:44
  important and I go and speak at places like I speak at AI speak
• 1:15:48
  at Canyon Ranch, which is a hoity toity spot.
• 1:15:52
  And I've done that for the past. Oh, I don't almost 10 years.
• 1:15:56
  And I usually get a very small group of people who are there
• 1:15:59
  trying to get healthy. And sometimes it's a really
• 1:16:03
  great place for them to dip their toe in and say, huh, as
• 1:16:06
  part of the Wellness picture, I wonder.
• 1:16:07
  And because there's no alcohol at Canyon Ranch, it gives people
• 1:16:11
  a really great opportunity to say, I miss wine more than I
• 1:16:15
  thought I would. What's going on?
• 1:16:17
  And there are also daily meetings at 12 step meetings at
• 1:16:20
  Canyon Ranch because the founder of Canyon Ranch was in recovery
• 1:16:24
  as well. So, you know, I'll, I speak at
• 1:16:27
  schools, I speak at conferences, I speak at, you know, Canyon
• 1:16:31
  Ranch if they'll have me. And I think that's just a part
• 1:16:34
  of trying to find a place that's less scary for people to start
• 1:16:39
  listening. And I think you, you said it
• 1:16:41
  right too, like going in as the church and horse, especially
• 1:16:44
  for, you know, when you said you wouldn't have listened to a talk
• 1:16:47
  on substance abuse when you were drinking.
• 1:16:49
  Because the guilt, I mean, and I think there's so much guilt and
• 1:16:52
  shame in so much anything you do as a as a mom, whether you from
• 1:16:58
  the very beginning, did you breastfeed?
• 1:16:59
  Did you not breastfeed? Do you have guilt about that?
• 1:17:01
  Like there's so many things you can think of that you can take
• 1:17:06
  on as I didn't do this right, I didn't do this right.
• 1:17:09
  Somehow I have failed. How can you work your way around
• 1:17:11
  it? And I, I love your Trojan horse
• 1:17:14
  metaphor because that's, that's it.
• 1:17:16
  Just sneak it in and it and it is good.
• 1:17:18
  And I especially love, by the way, the last take away.
• 1:17:20
  I want to say that. And it's your words was that if
• 1:17:22
  you well, it's your thoughts, if you fit, it's at the end.
• 1:17:28
  Like it like just like what you say to your kids.
• 1:17:30
  If you've messed this up, we're going to go forward.
• 1:17:32
  This isn't the end. It's OK.
• 1:17:33
  There's more than one day to raise a human.
• 1:17:36
  It doesn't happen that one time or the that one year, hopefully.
• 1:17:42
  So, yeah, thank you for that. I think it's good, reassuring.
• 1:17:45
  Absolutely. It's it's the around gift of
• 1:17:47
  failure stuff or around addiction inoculation stuff.
• 1:17:50
  You can say, you know what, sweetie, I'm really sorry.
• 1:17:52
  I have been underestimating what you can do for yourself and I've
• 1:17:55
  been doing too much for you. And that's going to stop today.
• 1:17:57
  So let's pick homework. I'm no longer going to nag or
• 1:18:02
  remind about your homework. That's you.
• 1:18:04
  And by the way, I've already let your teacher know that I'm
• 1:18:07
  backing off. This is something that I used to
• 1:18:09
  have to do when my kids were in school.
• 1:18:11
  I don't use the portal as a parent.
• 1:18:13
  So I would get in touch with the teachers and say, by the way, I
• 1:18:15
  don't use the portal. I'd rather just have actual
• 1:18:17
  communication with my kids. So I won't be checking up on
• 1:18:21
  anything on the portal. And so here's the best way to
• 1:18:23
  reach me if things start to circle the drain.
• 1:18:25
  And you know, your first line of communication should be with my
• 1:18:28
  kid. So it's not a matter of like,
• 1:18:32
  I'm going to stop reminding you about homework and that's it.
• 1:18:35
  You're on your own. There's a little bit of a you
• 1:18:38
  know, you're it's in education. We call it scaffolding here.
• 1:18:42
  It's sort of like training wheels.
• 1:18:44
  You know, you're you're you're pulling back, but you're also
• 1:18:47
  letting people know the best way to get in touch with you.
• 1:18:50
  And here's I prefer that you talk to my kid first, but here
• 1:18:53
  are some ways that we could step in and there's anyway, it's all
• 1:18:56
  in gift of failure and and in addiction inoculation.
• 1:18:58
  Same thing. You know, it's sweetie, I didn't
• 1:19:01
  fully understand risk factors when it comes to substance use
• 1:19:04
  like drinking or using weed. And I learned some stuff.
• 1:19:08
  And so we're going to change some of our house rules around
• 1:19:11
  substance use. And here's what they are.
• 1:19:13
  And here's why the why is so important.
• 1:19:16
  And you know, I'm sorry I got it wrong before, but now I'm going
• 1:19:19
  to move forward with the information I have and try to do
• 1:19:21
  my best. That was awesome.
• 1:19:24
  Thank you SO. Much for being here.
• 1:19:26
  I'm welcome. I'm so grateful for so many
• 1:19:29
  reasons. It was awesome.
• 1:19:31
  You are the best. Thank you.
• 1:19:32
  So grateful to you too. Thank you so much.
• 1:19:36
  I really appreciated this conversation with Jessica Leahy,
• 1:19:39
  especially the way she challenged so much of what we
• 1:19:42
  carry as moms, That pressure to get it right, to do more, to
• 1:19:46
  step in before anything goes wrong.
• 1:19:49
  Next week, we're stepping into another tough but really
• 1:19:52
  important conversation. We're talking about prevention,
• 1:19:56
  power, and what it actually takes to address sexual assault
• 1:19:59
  before it happens with Jess Ladd and Kristen Hatcher of The Fun
• 1:20:03
  to Prevent Sexual Assault. In the meantime, if this episode
• 1:20:06
  made you think of another mom in your life, send it to her.
• 1:20:09
  That's how these conversations keep going.
• 1:20:11
  Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week on ROAR.