So the important thing is to recognize when a child is moving towards trouble. Yes, and this book is very different from other books on the same topic in that it elaborates on the signs and the way parents rationalize the signs. The book contains interviews with teens who talk very directly about how they successfully manipulated their parents. Last year there was a lot of public debate about drug-testing kits that parents can use to find out if their children have been using. I've seen how easy it is for kids to figure out how to get around those kits.
Kids can be very devious.
Taking them in for drug screens can definitely be helpful, but what we generally advise is that parents become very alert to the possible signs and symptoms, which, again, are elaborated in great depth in the book, and that they take that information to the assessment agency. What parents often don't realize is that kids chose their friends, they gravitate towards the friends who support their drug and alcohol use, and they drop the friends who don't. So it's putting the cart before the horse. The sadness of the blame game is that parents think, if only we had had a better family or lived in a nicer neighborhood with a better school. They don't realize that this is an equal opportunity situation, that it happens to everyone, even in rural America.