Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy Earle: You're listening to Talking to Teens, where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host. Andy Earle.

We're here today with David Magee talking about the substance use secrets your teen doesn't want you to know.

What's going on with teens and substances today is very different from what parents experienced when they were teens. The whole landscape has completely changed. The pressures are different. The way that it's happening is different. The substances themselves are different.

And as parents, if we don't understand what's actually going on with teens today, we are at a very serious disadvantage.

After losing his own son, William, to an accidental drug overdose, David has become an advocate who speaks with students and parents all around the country about the student substance use crisis.

He is the creator and director of operations of the William McGee Institute for Student Well Being at the University of Mississippi.

And he's the author of Things Have Changed.

David McGee. Welcome to the Talking to Teens podcast. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

David Magee: Oh, thank you so much.

Andy Earle: Really excited to have you here, man. Really powerful book that you wrote. Things Have Changed: What Every Parent and Educator Should Know About the Student Mental Health and Substance Misuse Crisis. And we were just talking. You were writing business books earlier in your career and you made a transition here now. You wrote this memoir, Dear William. And now this 1 really focused on student mental health and substance use and the crisis among kids. What inspired that pivot?

David Magee: Maya Angelou, I heard her talk about once, crawling across the floor, calling to our purpose. We don't get there easily.

I really relate to that because I knew early on I would write and be a storyteller. But I honestly didn't know what direction I should take with that. And then I live life and we were just parents who wanted our children to have it better than we had it. And we're embarking on this American Dream and somehow we ended up in a nightmare. My own addiction, which was self medication for anxiety and depression, and not understanding how to speak as a man, cost me my career, my marriage. Then I end up at the same time with two sons in substance misuse and a daughter in eating disorder. And, look, on paper, they were perfect.

My son went on to college ran track. The 400 hurdles. Was in the honors college. He was all state. Fluent in Spanish. They were in church youth group every week. We thought we were doing it all right as parents and what happened is everything came crashing down. And I will say the good news is I did get my wife back and we were able to save our family.

We did lose our son, William, one of our three. We have two in successful recovery. But we lost our son, William, to an accidental drug overdose. But we found our joy and I tell everybody don't feel sorry for us. So that's how I got to this work in writing these books is we were just everybody.

And I found my calling the hard way. I crawled to it. And so many people asked me to share what we learned since. How we got to recovery. And it felt really important to make that the backbone of my storytelling.

Andy Earle: It's really cool what you're doing and sharing so much from your children's stories and your own story here in the book, as well as a lot of statistics and data and real facts about this stuff. And also from kids that you talk to and parents and families that feel really current.

Parents need to know what's really going on with kids. And there's a disconnect there, between what parents really are aware of, or want to admit to themselves.

David Magee: There's an exceptional disconnect. They'll tell me a lot. Oh, I know what's going on. My teen talks to me. And I'm like, okay sorry, it's hard for the teens to even be honest with themselves at times. It's so overwhelming. So it's not that they're trying to be dishonest. And it's not even dishonesty. It's that communication is difficult. And that's a lot of what I try to do is help parents understand you have to meet your child where they are. And that's a lot of what this book, Things Have Changed, is about.

Sure, it's about how to help your children. But it's not about ground them four times and you'll get a better result. It's about how to communicate with them about these issues.

Andy Earle: You talk about just the word addict in the book, and I thought that was really powerful. When you say the word addict to a parent, which is not really favored by health care providers, but is a common term that we use, we think of this like frail, scabby, toothless person out on a dark alley somewhere, fiending for drugs or something like that. And that really helps us think of it as separate or not relevant to us because, oh, that's so far away. And that's not me.

That's not my kids. That's nobody in our circle. It really struck me that there's that distancing happening.

David Magee: That's a great point, Andy. I got a call the other day from a parent who had read my book. You don't know me, but, I read the book and reached out on social media.

I need some help. I got my 16 year old son, star on the football team, suddenly having issues at school. Got in some trouble for yelling at a teacher. Has never done that. Has been punished every which way to stop. They're trying to punish him out of using marijuana and alcohol. Won't stop using marijuana multiple times a day.

Got into the phone, found that he's brokering marijuana deals among students in the high school. And so they call wanting help. And so this goes back to the stigma of the addict that you're talking about. So in every scenario, their son, who is a fantastic human. He's sick. He's not bad. And he's suffering from an illness in the mental health spectrum.

But when we began to talk about solutions, the addiction comes up and immediately they put up all these barriers. No, I did not say he was an addict. And I said, look, to be able to help, you have to understand that it's not that they're a bad person. This is a disease. It's okay. And it affects a lot of the population. But the only way to fix it is to get some help. And to address it. But the walls went up so hard. The parent stigma, not the child's. The parent stigma of, I will not have my child label as such. And therefore they opted not to really explore.

They said, we're going to just try once again to put more rules around. And I said, look, nobody's punished their way out of it. Nobody. Punishment has never saved anybody from addiction. You won't be the first.

But it really addresses what you're saying. Our children just need us more. I said, if you just go to your child and say, how are you doing? Really? How are you doing? And listen and pause. Eventually, the answer will come. I'm not doing so well. And then you can begin to dig into the solution, trying to help them cover it up and trying the rules that have been broken 1000 times once again, it will not work. It will not work.

Andy Earle: That's something you talk about towards the end of the book I found really powerful is the questions that we're asking. And a lot of times we're asking what questions. What happened? What are you doing? What's going on? And switching those to be how questions. How do you feel about this? How do you feel about that? How does that make you feel? And simple change, but really profound difference.

David Magee: Yeah they're seen and heard when you do that. And see, we parents mean well, but our fear drives us to cheerlead our children all the time. If they say, I'm frustrated because such and such , we're inclined to say, but you have so much to be happy for. Come on. Come on. You've got all these friends at school. You're doing well on the team. You're going to Disney. Remember we got that Disney trip next week. But see, if they feel it, it's real. And they do better if we see them and hear them and just go, okay. All right.

How do you feel when you were at home with the family on Friday night and all your friends were out? How does it feel when you're in class and you don't think your writing is good enough? How does that feel? And a lot of times when you're asking these how's and why's and just pausing and listening, it will bring them closer to you instead of you constantly telling them how they should feel and what they should do.

Andy Earle: But for some reason that's, it's hard to do, or it's not a natural impulse.

David Magee: Oh, we parents just want control. Let's be honest. We mean well, but we really would just prefer to control them where we want them to go.

Andy Earle: Mold and shape.

David Magee: I think the way to mold and shape is mentoring. The mentor is actually very powerful, and the studies show the mentor can be an incredibly influential factor in a young person's life.

So when you think about a mentor with more engagement, that's where parents do best. You still have to have the upper hand. But in that mentor role they can understand the hierarchy, but also build some trust around that.

Andy Earle: Something you really pull back the curtain on is just how a lot of this world happens. How are kids getting drugs? How are how are they taking them? What's really going on with that? And I think that's really important for us to know about as parents. Simple things like how so much of drug trade today happens through social media apps.

People are finding, on Instagram, Snapchat, making the deals. And passing the money through Venmo, Cash App. Some of these really simple apps. And if you can start to get a little more savvy and understand what's going on.

You talk about seeing seeing a bunch of Venmo on your child's Venmo account and just starting to ask questions. How are you doing four transactions a day?

David Magee: Yeah, they're not buying that much pizza.

Andy Earle: They're not splitting that many bills with your friends. What's going on there?

David Magee: Look, it's a different day. Teens and college students do practically every illegal drug transaction through their smartphone device on these apps you mentioned. Every one. That's how it all goes down.

And there's also dark webs and other... My son, William, who we lost to an accidental drug overdose, ran college track at the University of Mississippi. In high school, he was drug tested. He never failed a drug test. But he practically, I found out later, was never sober a day from about 15 onwards.

And yet he never failed a drug test. They are so smart in how they communicate and the means. They're not 1 step ahead. They're like 70 steps ahead. And the digital world takes them to places that we can't keep up with. There's so many shields, so many barriers, that it's very hard for parents to really understand.

And, look, there's a lot of other factors, those devices and apps do. Children today, teens and college students, go to bed on average about 2 hours later a night than we did when we were teens at my age. And that's causing a lot of sleep deprivation. And in sleep deprivation the common symptoms are anxiety, depression, and often closely mimics the symptoms of ADHD. And so young people can be prone to self medicating, like buying Adderall.

And I don't want to create any stigma. I'm not talking about Adderall for an adult or a child that is from your doctor from your pharmacy. Look, all medicine came to market for good reason. No Stigma created here. Let's clear that up first. I'm talking about young people buying Adderall that is not prescribed for them. What we're seeing on a college campus today and in many high schools, the number one drug misused beyond cannabis and alcohol is Adderall.

But follow me here. None of it is actually Adderall. Because what students tell me is there aren't any students giving away their Adderall. It's all counterfeit. There's not enough supply. They can barely fill the prescriptions that are out there. And so when young people are buying Adderall, 90 plus percent of the time, and this is a fact, it's a statistical fact, 90 plus percent of the time they are buying counterfeit Adderall. And 100 percent of the time that counterfeit Adderall has fentanyl in it because they can't make counterfeit Adderall that's any good. And so they dust a little fentanyl and it makes them come back for more. And so what we're seeing is this alarming trend. So much of it radiates from this smartphone device. Look, I have one. I'm on Instagram. It serves me. But we have to understand for this generation, something has drastically changed for them.

And it is impacting their lives in ways beyond our comprehension.

Andy Earle: There's a lot of that going on with trading pills in high school and it has a safer feeling to it because it feels like, oh, this is just somebody who had too much, who has a prescription. Some other student who's maybe traded it to somebody else who's traded to somebody else.

And I'm just picking up some of these pills. And it's from a doctor originally. So it's a real thing. This isn't something I'm just getting off the street or something. It's like from Timmy.

David Magee: I talk to a lot of students about this. They'll say, yeah, I did buy some Adderall that wasn't mine. But he told me it came from his sister's friend. And I'm like, okay, you need to go take a closer look. And it's never... there's no law enforcement. There's no student. I can't find anybody that tells me it's anything but counterfeit.

Andy Earle: Which is really dangerous because then we think we're taking just some Adderall. It's just going to help me study. Everyone else is doing it. It's prescribed by doctors. And then actually it's laced with all kinds of stuff. But most importantly , fentanyl.

David Magee: A young man I've known since he was a child, he and his friends, his fraternity house, they made a buy of what they called Percocet. They called it Percocet. The drug dealer called it Percocet. He and all the friends got some. They actually were splitting it up into some micro doses. The problem is that his microdose had a clump of fentanyl. Because it's not made by a pharmacy. It's made by somebody like in a hazmat suit with a broom, mixing around in a bucket. And he's dead. We're losing staggering numbers in overdoses.

And a lot of them are just like that. You're just like, what? How did that possibly happen? But they called themselves buying Percocet.

I helped one of his friends get to recovery afterwards. And his friend called me some months after. And said, even I went to treatment saying I have a Percocet problem.

He said, it took me getting out of treatment to be able to call you and say, I had a fentanyl problem.

Andy Earle: But it's masquerading as all these other things like Oxycontin, Xanax, and so kids think that they're doing these prescription drugs. And really it's street drugs.

David Magee: What I tell parents if you need to just have one stern thing you say, I say rules, punishment doesn't work. Whatever. But I say, you need to start when they're in about in middle school. Look, we taught young people to wear seat belts. They don't really drink and drive anymore. It's not much of a thing because they know. You got to start in elementary school saying, never take a pill that did not come from your doctor and your pharmacy. And say it like that. And say it over and over. A lot of the, you'll be punished if you do, that's just air to them. And it goes in one ear. But when you say it like that, I've had a teen text me back and go, man, I remember that. Because I say that to teens. That's really the 1. Just say it to them over and over. It will keep them alive. If you say it that way, they will remember it.

And when somebody offers them that they will think twice.

Andy Earle: It can be hard because it's like your friends saying, Oh no, I got it from a buddy. It's good. He got it from his parents medicine cabinet. No worries.

David Magee: It's not your doctor and your pharmacist. You cannot take it.

Andy Earle: You also talk at length about marijuana in the book. And I think important to talk a little about. You have some data in here too, interestingly, about different methods, from vaping to smoking, and how effective it is. And as the title of the book, Things Have Changed. It's such a different world when it comes to marijuana these days, with the potency and the portability of just having a little vape in your pocket that you can just cover up the smell or yeah it's really that discreet and so easy to just do on a low level all day. And yes, I think we don't really quite get that or realize that.

David Magee: It has changed so drastically. I can tell you that in the colleges and high schools I visit, there is an absolute marijuana crisis going on, particularly among young men. And schools tell me it's happened fast.

One school told me, they said, we drug test, and we called the company last year and said, Hey, something is wrong. Our drug test can't be right. We're reading such drastic amounts of THC. Six and seven times above what we collected for years. I tell that story in schools now, and all the counselors call me up after and go, same thing happened here.

We just didn't call the company because we realized something has changed.

Number one, the potency of street marijuana has increased 400 to 600 percent since 1995. All teens and college students are getting their marijuana, even in a state that's legal, they're using street marijuana. Most aren't old enough. And on top of that, if they are old enough, the stuff you buy at dispensaries isn't nearly as strong as what they get from street marijuana. So they stick with that.

Number 2, as you mentioned, they're vaping it. The means that they're using now is taking it in it's 70 to 90 percent of potency of that 4 to 600 percent stronger marijuana.

And we are seeing just scary effects of cannabis use disorder, particularly among young men. And there's a lot of misinformation. What I tell students, I say, look, ultimately, whether you use alcohol or marijuana or whatever, that's your choice. I'm not here to tell you what to do or not to do. But I say, I just need you to have the information.

And culturally, there's been a big lie told. If you do a survey of parents and students, do you think marijuana reduces your anxiety? I'm telling you, they will come in at high numbers and go, yes. Actually, the studies are very clear for at least 50 percent of the users. And depending on what kind of strain they're using, it actually not only increases their anxiety, it greatly increases it.

And that's what we're seeing. Some of the local emergency rooms and communities I visit, they tell me they're seeing an incredible rise in young people going to the emergency room for cannabis related. It's 2 things. 1, they try to stop themselves and they're having pretty horrible withdrawal. And that used to never be a thing. Or 2, they're in a bad reaction from something so toxic and or a psychotic kind of episode. In a lot of college communities that's one of the top reasons young people are showing up at emergency room.

Andy Earle: I think traditionally it's been assumed, Oh, you don't get addicted to marijuana. That's not like a habit forming substance, but the way that it's used today, it definitely is. When you're vaping it all day long, your body is getting used to that. And when you stop...

David Magee: Your body is saying, I feel it pulling away and I don't want you to stop.

I had a pediatrician in a community who somebody highly respected. I heard him tell a parent not too long ago at some community discussion, marijuana is not addictive. Because he went to medical school in the era when that was believed to be the case.

The studies are clear. We are in an absolute epidemic of marijuana addiction among young people . And it's happening very rapidly. So look, I tell young people, it's your choice what you do. But here's the thing. What I'm for is the education. We just can't betray our young people. They are smart. They have minds. We're so determined to teach them algebra in middle school. Why won't we take the necessary steps to teach them about their brain and their mind and the impacts of that and how their brain needs development with unmitigated factors.

Andy Earle: You have a passage in here that I found powerful. You're talking to a kid who's struggling with marijuana usage and he says, I'm struggling with marijuana. He said, they'd laugh me out of there if I showed up saying I was addicted to marijuana.

I think that's really just shows this sort of assumption that we're talking about how, oh, marijuana, it's not addicting. Real drugs are addicting, but marijuana is not addicting. I just really like it.

David Magee: So that's what they'll say. I just really like it. Yeah. That's what my son, William said. He told me that over and over. For me, I just really like it. It helps me. And see, it's like a smoker. Think about a smoker. A smoker is the same way. When nicotine starts pulling away, they're not drawing more nicotine. I've been one in a former life. They're not drawing more nicotine for the pleasant feeling after about the first handful of times in their life, they're pulling more nicotine to avoid the withdrawal.

They're pulling more nicotine to avoid feeling bad. So yeah, you like it because it keeps you from a physical and mental crisis for the moment. And also the stigma about marijuana addiction. Here's where there's not stigma. We have young men today easily and readily admitting anxiety. I suffered anxiety.

They're telling the truth. But self medication is not the answer because it usually makes it go up. I've seen very few students successfully self medicate with substances. Because usually they get in over their head. It has to come from a doctor and a pharmacist and regulate it to what dosage you can manage.

Andy Earle: David, thank you so much for sharing your story and such intimate details, and also such real talk about what's going on with teens today. It's really been an enlightening and fascinating conversation. I really encourage people to go pick up a copy of the book, which is, Things Have Changed: What Every Parent and Educator Should Know About the Student Mental Health and Substance Misuse Crisis. Where can people go to follow what you're doing, find out more about what you're up to?

David Magee: You can check me out at David D. McGee dot com. That's m-a-g-e-e. David D. McGee dot com. And, look, we've created a university Institute to dig into schools to do some of this work.

We've created a center at the University of Mississippi, all named after my late son, William, and now we're really looking nationally talking to people like the partnership to end addiction and others to think about, how can we do this better? And how can we do this differently? But I'll end just by saying it starts one by one, like in the home with the parents. And that can feel like a lot of pressure, but actually takes the pressure off of you. Meaning stop trying to raise a super child and just try to help them cultivate some emotional intelligence. If you do that, you have a lot better chance of having a childhood joy and a family of joy.

Andy Earle: We're here today with David McGee talking about the student mental health and substance misuse crisis. And we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

David Magee: That's how we can help them really ask themselves, why am I doing that? Is it actually fun? And when they can begin to answer the question of why they're doing it, you begin to have a chance of them thinking, not the best use of my time.

I tried to ground our son, William, so many times, and it never worked. He had friends bringing him sympathy drugs in the window. It's like a sheriff in a high opioid use county in Florida told me, we will not arrest ourselves out of this crisis. And you will not ground your child out of your crisis.

So when you're talking to them, you're not like, I told you don't go out with Mikey. They're going to go hang around Mikey. It's a good time to then reflect, as we develop this toolbox, you talked a lot about it's important to choose the right friend.

Is this aligning with what you say helps keep you on the right track? Those kind of approaches have proven to be very helpful.

Andy Earle: Want to hear the full interview? Sign up for a subscription today. It's completely affordable and your membership supports the work we do here at Talking to Teens. And you can now sign up directly through Apple podcasts. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.