Aaron D. Neufeld- Blog #27

BLOG POST #27- Teens Experimenting

Almost every teenager experiments at one point with drugs and/or alcohol. Why? Well I asked a fourteen year old girl and a seventeen year old boy and their answers were basically the same: It makes life more fun, it’s exciting, and they enjoy the rush of doing something they know they shouldn’t be. Parents catching children with a dime bag of weed hidden in their knapsack or some liquor stashed under their bed, is normal. It’s perfectly normal for teens to try experimenting with this stuff, yet it is never any less shocking or hurtful to parents when they do.

I have a lot of younger friends because in the community I live in, there in fact aren’t too many guys or girls my age. I mean, sure, they live there, but they all attend different colleges and universities across the country or may have moved away from home already. So I’ve gotten close with a bunch of high school kids near my home. That puts me in an awkward situation. When my younger friends want to have some risqué fun, where does that put me? What am I supposed to do? I’m their friends, not their mentors. I can’t stop them. And if I tried to do the responsible thing and lecture them or scold them, they’d only turn away from me as friends and shut me out of their lives, like they do their parents. I’m in that awkward in-between stage where I’m a friend but I have some responsibility to make sure they don’t fuck their lives up.

So do I drink with them? Or do I hang out with them when they decide to do their experimenting and make sure they are OK? I know I can’t stop them so do I take the mindset of ‘If you can’t beat em, join em?’ or do I hang with them while they do it so that I can be there for them if they need me? It’s tough. It’s hard to know where to go and what to do in these situations. And as I’m writing this I’ve come to realize that this post is less about teens experimenting as it is about my difficult relationships with friends in high school. Once you’re older, age difference in friends makes very little difference. But when it’s high school-college friendships, laws, society, and life, make things difficult.