Recently an eleven-year-old child took marijuana to school and said it was his parent’s. Basically the child had just completed his school D.A.R.E. (drug abuse resistance education) program and I suppose felt compelled to turn in his parents for their “bad” behavior. Later the two parents were arrested and charged with drug possession.

I remember taking D.A.R.E. in the fifth grade. I remember upon completion, we had to write an essay telling about what we had learned and there would be two winners of the contest who would have to stand up in front of the entire school and read their essay. Well, even though standing up and reading my essay was my worst nightmare and I deliberately tried to do a crappy job at writing it lol - I was picked along with the brother of the D.A.R.E. officer that taught our class. Wasn’t that a little coincidental? Needless to say, I sweated and got through the entire thing.

I do think that it is a good program that can help to educate children about drug use, however I’m not quite sure how I feel about this whole situation. Honestly, my own mother was a hippie and the thought never crossed my mind to try and find her “stash” and take it to school. The fact of the matter is, just because my mother had a certain type of lifestyle preference didn’t mean that I myself would grow up to be a user because I didn’t. There are plenty of parents who use no drugs, but have children that do so and children of parent’s who use drugs but never touch any of it. So if the case is made that the parent’s shouldn’t be using drugs because their children will, I’m not buying it. Therefore the only other situation at hand is that the parent’s should be in trouble because it’s illegal. But is the purpose of the D.A.R.E. program to educate children about drugs so that they can empower them to make their own educated decisions? Or is it to help acquire new informants and put children in an awful predicament?

I mean how far can all this really go? Is the child aware that they may be placed in a system that fails children every day and in a home of stranger’s due to this report? Obviously if the home life was filled with nothing but non-stop partying and drug usage, this may be a whole other story, but what if these are two parent’s that smoke pot occasionally for recreational purposes and unfortunately their child was good at snooping? I mean who knows what the outcome of all of this could mean for this child and his family in the end?

It’s not just with drugs these days, but also with other things like teaching children to dial 911. While it’s necessary that they learn how to dial it, it’s also necessary for them to know the possibilities and outcomes of what dialing it can lead to. I’ll never forget after my oldest learned how to dial it. We were at my mothers on an ordinary Sunday afternoon visit and all of a sudden we get a knock on the door. It was a policeman in uniform on a bike who said they got a 911 call from the residence. I’m like, what? Sure enough, as soon as the doorbell rang my five-year-old had ran and hid under a table somewhere due to him having been playing with the phone and dialed it. Fortunately they didn’t fine us or anything! But even I have been threatened by my children that they are going to turn me into the police if I were to spank them or were “mean” to them…seriously? I mean we are supposed to do our best at loving, supporting and disciplining our children all so that we can worry about being “told on” to some higher power and authority? Where is the gray area with this, because there indeed is some.

We go from times where no one talked about abuse or told anything that went on inside the home, to a time where children can go to school and “tell on” their parent’s for just about anything and a parent can be investigated etc. While I agree that testing parent’s before they have children in some way could be a great avenue to PREVENT certain unhealthy situations and lives for children, I can’t say I agree with someone being interrogated or investigated after the fact due to a simple complaint coming from a child. Is there any room for parent’s rights in these situations? Then we have situations like the one’s in Zahra’s case where if a child is really being abused or neglected, they wouldn’t even think about telling someone because they are really in fear of their life and are being abused - hmmmm.

To me there’s a lot of kinks that really need to be worked out in these types of “parenting” procedures that fall outside of the parents.