Study: Listening Keeps Kids Off Drugs

March 24 -- If a parent doesn't listen to a teenager who wants to talk about a complaint, no matter how trivial, it's unlikely the teenager will listen to the parent when it comes to life or death issues.

New research out of the University of Illinois suggests that advertisements that plead with parents to talk with their kids about drugs aren't telling the complete story, says John Caughlin, professor of speech communication at the university's Urbana-Champaign campus.

"If you haven't been listening to your child all along, it's unrealistic to expect that you are going to have this one conversation where you sit down and talk about drugs and that's going to be the magic bullet," says John Caughlin, professor of speech communication at the university's Urbana-Champaign campus.

Caughlin and a colleague, Rachel S. Malis, now at Northwestern University, set out to put a scientific face on a subject that is really quite hard to pin down. They wanted to know if there is a clear link between how a parent deals with an adolescent's complaints or conflicts, and the likelihood that the adolescent will turn to drugs.

Their study, published in the current issue of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, offers evidence that there is indeed a clear link. Teenagers who participated in the study were much more likely to become involved with drugs and alcohol if they thought their parents were not taking their complaints seriously, even regarding matters that seem mundane and trivial.

Hard to Test

What appears to be happening, Caughlin says, is a teenager who thinks his or her complaints are not being taken seriously by the parent loses some self esteem, and loss of self esteem has been shown in many other studies to be related to drug and alcohol abuse.

So when a father laughs off a request from a son who wants to date more, as one father did during the study, the teenager is left diminished in his own eyes. In this case, as in many others, the teenager whose request was not taken seriously admitted using alcohol and drugs.