A Parent’s Guide To Lying To Your Children About Drugs
By: Rip Warren
Tags: Humor, Drugs, Teen Drug Use, Parenting, Satire

A Parent’s Guide To Lying To Your Children About Drugs

5 tips to help you evade questions about all those fun times you had before kids ruined the party.

Photo by cottonbro on Pexels

For a lot of us who are now parents to teenagers, we were the first batch of children whose folks lied to us about their drug use. Prior to the hippie and boomer generations, parents had no need for dishonesty, as the most dangerous intoxicants they ingested were gin rickeys and the fumes from the lead-based paint used on their homes. Parents, to this day, continue to lie to the fruit of their loins, ensuring that misrepresenting one’s own experiences with drugs remains an American tradition, like crippling student loan debt, mass shootings, and celebrating the 4th of July.

You don’t have to be a child psychologist to know it’s a bad idea to regale your kids with the tale of the time Daddy did an eight ball of the Devil’s dust with two strippers in a New Orleans pool hall. Instead, it's important to learn to bend the truth to protect your children’s innocence and lie like you’re Donald Trump at a campaign rally, just as you were raised. Below are some helpful tips to ensure your duplicitous answers don’t ring any alarm bells, mostly because it would harsh the buzz from the edible you ate an hour ago.

1) Deny

Never admit to anything. Remember, your children have no proof. Finding your Cypress Hill tapes isn’t enough evidence of your alleged enjoyment of the occasional jazz cigarette. They will have a hard time proving you went to Phish concerts “just for the music,” unless, of course, they listen to any of their songs.

2) Be vague

Even if pressured to offer a cautionary tale, never discuss specifics. Sure, tell them about the time your friend Doug spiked your drink with a hit of LSD as some sort of warning to them against keeping their guard down; just don’t tell them about the previous six hits you ingested and that “Doug” was a hallucination.

3) Distract

Say your children find that photo of you at Burning Man wearing nothing but sunglasses and flowers in your beard. Instead of admitting to your drug-soaked weekend, point out that their mother is in the background taking a crap on the desert floor. After they see the reason you kept the photo in the first place, they will no longer be concerned about how much peyote you gobbled during the best weekend of your life.

4) Exaggerate

Feel free to tell them all about the “people you know” and their experiences with drugs. You can even make stuff up. For example, tell them about an old college buddy, let’s call him Gary, whose appetite for pills caused him to fail out of school and now the only job he can get is manually masturbating wild pigs for research purposes. It’ll scare them, but they don’t need to hear the details of how it’s the third-largest pig masturbation company in the Midwest. Gary’s doing just fine.

5) Punish

If all else fails, grounding them always works. A punishment ends any uncomfortable conversation with your children instantly. Think how useful it would have been if, instead of being cornered into the awkward conversation about drugs, you could have just sent them to their room for, oh, I don’t know, looking at you funny. You wouldn’t have had to lie about that time you and the wife backpacked through Europe after college and ended up in a Berlin nightclub doing speed with a guy named “Razor” while watching a private sex show consisting of three men, a goose, and what Urban Dictionary calls a “Sloppy Kentucky Sunrise.”

Remember, it’s always better to tell your kids the truth, but sometimes it’s just not possible. The need to keep our kids safe and free from learning from their own mistakes outweighs any need for honesty. The last thing any of us want is for our children to become dishonest, drug-addicted sex perverts, just like their parents.