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Look, I don’t want to slander an entire group of people without hearing each and every one of their individual stories, but let me go ahead and do it anyway.
If you hire a drug dog to search your kid’s room for drugs, you are an asshole.
But that’s exactly what parents these days are doing. I take back every bad thing I ever said about millennials. You don’t have it easy. Because this sucks. The story comes from The Washington Post, who talked to some parents and drug dog handlers about the latest trend in parenting.
Meet James.
When James noticed that his teenage daughter had taken to spending time with a new group of friends and that there was an unsavory odor in her room, he became suspicious.
The Kentucky father wondered if his 14-year-old daughter was using drugs, but he didn’t have any hard evidence to support his fear.
So James — who asked that the newspaper not use his last name, to protect his daughter’s identity — did what a growing number of parents in the Louisville area are doing: He paid $99 to have a drug-sniffing dog search his home.
Listen what James has to say about his decision to bring in a drug dog to sniff his daughter’s room.
“I’m not a snooping parent,” he told the Courier-Journal. “I want my daughter to be able to trust me, but I gotta protect her.”
Oh, yea. Sure. Not a snooping parent, not one bit.
He seemed to handle it with aplomb.
After the specially trained dog found a tiny glass pipe containing marijuana hidden inside his daughter’s makeup stand, James confronted the teenager and she admitted the pipe was hers. He destroyed the pipe with a baseball bat and says the entire episode brought him closer to his daughter.
Yea. That’s EXACTLY what happened. Exactly. Thanks, dad. You know you could have just thrown it in the trash. But you went the psychotic route, smashing a pipe with a baseball bat which, yes, definitely made your daughter love your more.
Even more parents around Louisville are endearing themselves to their kids in the same way, because the firm Last Chance K9 Service say they’ve searched 50 homes since they started their business in September.
In nine out of 10 homes, Davis told The Washington Post, his dogs have located drugs. The most common drug the drug-sniffing dogs find is heroin, Davis said, though his dogs have also turned up cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamines and barbiturates, sometimes elaborately hidden in homes and cars.
Okay. I take back my slander. It’s okay if you use a dog to find out your son or daughter is using heroin. But pot, let that shit slide. Be thankful it’s not something worse. Pretend it never happened.
Because unless you are saving their life, it really is a terrible idea, says every parenting psychologist ever.
Lawrence Balter, a professor of applied psychology at New York University and the author of multiple books about parenting, said parents may find it challenging to build positive relationships with their children if their kids feel like they’re under surveillance.
“It’s best to understand how widespread drug use is among teenagers,” Balter told The Post. “Teenagers will only just become more secretive if they feel like they’re being spied on. If parents act like police, I think kids just become more deceptive and sneaky.”
I know I would. I didn’t quit smoking pot when my mom found mine. I lied and told her it was something else then kept it in my car.
Perhaps the only plus side of the whole enterprise is Last Chance promises not to reveal any information to law enforcement about substances found. So parents aren’t getting their kids arrested at least.
Which is nice, I guess.
[Via The Washington Post]