Having Conversations About Alcohol and Drug Use Podcast

0:00 MUSIC

0:07 ANNMARIE MCMAHILL:

Hello, I'm Annmarie McMahill and this is a Tools for Your Child’s Success podcast. In this podcast, we'll be talking about how to have conversations with your child about alcohol and drug use.

DR. ANJALI NANDI

It's incredibly important that we have ongoing conversations with our kids. As parents, we play one of the most important roles in developing their decision making skills and in helping them translate their values into action.

ANNMARIE MCMAHILL

I'd like to introduce today's guest, Dr. Anjali NandiI.

Dr. Nandi is an organizational consultant in the human service field. She supports criminal justice agencies, hospitals and medical providers and schools find innovative ways of developing their potential through leadership training, program valuations, skill building, staff wellness and implementation of evidence based practices. She designs and delivers training in the fields of behavior change and addictions throughout the country.

In her clinical work as a bilingual psychotherapist, Dr. Nandi has been the program director of state-licensed out-patient drug and alcohol treatment agencies in Colorado, and for over 20 years has provided individual and group therapies to clients, including adolescents with depression, anxiety, addictions and trauma.

ANNMARIE MCMAHILL:

Welcome, Anjali, thanks for being here.

DR. ANJALI NANDI:

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

ANNMARIE MCMAHILL:

So having conversations about alcohol, marijuana and other drugs with our children isn't easy. It can be frightening and leave parents feeling overwhelmed and ill equipped. My hope for today is that we can discuss some of the conversations that we should be having with our kids about alcohol and drugs and get specific ideas of what those conversations really sound like. Sometimes we might want one conversation that's as simple as saying, like, "You don't drink or do drugs, do you?" But we know that it really needs to be a lot of conversations. And all of these conversations are seeking to grow skills within our kids. So to begin today, I think, if you want to discuss for a few minutes, the influence that parents and those in a parenting role have in addressing alcohol and drug use with their kids.

DR. ANJALI NANDI:

Yeah, that's so important, because parents plays such an incredibly important role when, uh, growing and maturing their kids. So it's very easy for us as parents to think that we don't matter, that it's really only social media and friends and school, and whatever exposure our kids are getting from the outside world, that that's really where they're learning. And yes, that is true, they are learning from all of these different places, but as parents, we play one of the most important roles in developing their moral compass, in developing their decision making skills, and in helping them translate their values into action.

So it's incredibly important that we have ongoing conversations with our kids, even though sometimes these conversations are incredibly clumsy. I know from personal experience, my conversations are always clumsy with my kiddo, who's a teenager. Uh, and yet, having frequent and ongoing short conversations, with our kids have such an incredible impact on, uh, the decisions that they make, in terms of, uh, drug use in particular, since that's what we're talking about.

ANNMARIE MCMAHILL:

I think that it's interesting to think about, you know, coming at it with a bit of a plan, because my conversations too, have been rather clumsy, but I think to have a plan and look for those, for those opportunities, is key. And I think to realize as well, that it's not some other