How much do you tell your kids about your youth?

[credoconsolans]

A little awkward this morning. LOL. Kids said, "yeah but you were a nerd when you were in school, mom." and without thinking I laughed, "no, I was not a nerd." Ooops. "Well, what were you?" What am I supposed to say? I was a stoner? When I was your age I was dealing drugs, skipping school and attending keg parties? Crap, I didn't want to go here... should have just copped to being a nerd.

I wound up saying, "I was one of the ones hanging around." Which got them both cackling with glee, "you were a loiterer!?" Yeah, that's it.

LOL.

Had a family reunion party last night. Was laughing with a cousin who has a child soon to be in college. We were reminiscing about her glory days and then I asked what she was going to tell her daughter how to behave in college, when she herself was a band groupie who got shit-faced drunk and often ended up one of those passed out bodies you see on the floor after the lights go up at an outdoor concert or those party girls who called in sick to work when she was actually still drunk and barely getting hungover at 8 am.

She was thoughtful and said she wasn't sure yet.

I was never curious about what my mom did in her younger years. I should have been. I found out years later she was running off with boyfriends and just up and leaving to cross the country to be with friends in other states to work eventually wandering home and dancing at clubs at all hours.

I am a boring, hobbit like nerd compared to my other family members.

 

[gmbteach]

I don't have any children, but I am interested in this from the opposite point of view.

My dad is a serious nerd - Physical Chemist, always has his nose in a book, drinks half a pint of beer once a week... boring.

It wasn't until I was long since grown up and left home that his youngest sister - my Aunty Marjory - spilled the beans, at a family get together (I think it was Christmas dinner, but it might have been a birthday). He specialises in Thermal Explosion Theory, but apparently while he was in high school, he was more interested in the practical aspect of the field. Most infamously, as she related the tale, when he blew up and demolished Old Ma Mansfield's garden shed.

When she mentioned this, the room fell silent, and everyone turned to look at him as he slowly turned as red as a beet with embarrassment. Then my sister said, "Is that really true?"

To which he replied "No!"

"I may have caused an explosion to occur inside her shed, but it was still mostly standing afterwards".

 

[KeepTalking]

My wife and I have always been open and honest with our kids about our lives, and found that they have reciprocated. We told them about the drinking and drugs that we did, why we did them, what the pros and cons were. Our kids are relatively well adjusted, they do drink, but have mostly avoided drugs. Our son has tried pot and mushrooms, and talked to us about it. He lived in Washington for a couple of years, until just recently, but after recreational marijuana was legalized.

We put our daughter on birth control the minute she started dating, so that she would not end up a pregnant teenager as happened with us. She is a single mother now, but that did not happen until her mid-20's. We taught our son to use birth control as well, as soon as he started dating. He got married at 20, while in the Navy, and his son was born two years later.

You can't control everything, or really much of anything, your kids will do in their lifetimes, but you can control your side of the relationship with them. If you are wondering what you should tell your kids, you should ask yourself what harm there is in being honest with them. If you did drugs, or drank heavily, did you learn anything from those experiences? If so, there is a lesson that you can impart to them from being honest, and maybe it will be a lesson that they won't have to learn the hard way, like may have happened with you.

What they are going to learn from programs like DARE is that drugs are bad, period. They will eventually ask the question, "If all drugs are so bad in every instance, why does anyone do them?" DARE won't have an answer for them, and you won't have an answer for them if you haven't been honest with them. They may decide to experiment because they know they are not being dealt with honestly, and when they do, they will be unlikely to tell you about it, because you have already told them they are terrible kids for experimenting.

Just my perspective, my kids have not been perfect, but they have had a much better start at adulthood than my wife and I had, and I like to think that our honesty with them was at least partly responsible for this.

 

[Rhea]

I think the problem with being perfectly honest is that it can give them ideas.

I can hear my son saying, "Is that a thing!? I didn't even know that was a thing!"

The other risk, in my personal opinion, is that they have trouble calculating odds of things, and it can make them think a thing is safer than it really is if someone they think of as their rock has survived the thing with no apparent harm or trauma. Except, really, it was just luck; and luck don't last.

So I will give the parts of the story that are useful, but no, not all of the parts.
My children's lives are so far removed from mine in terms of risk and influence that it is hardly recognizable.

 

[KeepTalking]

I think the problem with being perfectly honest is that it can give them ideas.

I can hear my son saying, "Is that a thing!? I didn't even know that was a thing!"

Being open and honest does not mean you have to volunteer every bit of information about your youth. Just be honest when they ask questions. Kids are going to get ideas, from other kids, from the internet, from movies, or even TV. If they get ideas about things that you have had experience with, but you have lied to them or made them otherwise think that you had no experience with those things, then it makes having a conversation about whatever it is that much more difficult.

The other risk, in my personal opinion, is that they have trouble calculating odds of things, and it can make them think a thing is safer than it really is if someone they think of as their rock has survived the thing with no apparent harm or trauma. Except, really, it was just luck; and luck don't last.

My experiences certainly were not all positive. I was able to relate to my kids that while I had a lot of fun, bad things happened as a result.

So I will give the parts of the story that are useful, but no, not all of the parts.

They may just pick up on the fact that you are hiding things from them, but I hope it works out for you. I have several siblings, and none of them were honest with their kids about their youth. The results were mixed, but two of my nephews have gone through some very rough times with drugs, specifically heroin. One has turned his life around since, but the other still seems to be struggling with it. I don't know if things would have turned out different if their parents had been more honest about things, and I have other nieces and nephews who are doing very well. The thing is, they all found out sooner or later that their parents were no angels, and in at least one case (the one nephew who is still struggling with heroin addiction), there has been some resentment that his parents kept things from him.

My children's lives are so far removed from mine in terms of risk and influence that it is hardly recognizable.

Hopefully that will continue to be the case, I wish you all the luck in the world with your kids, and I certainly understand how hard it can be to admit to them that you have done things that were wrong. They won't be kids forever though, so be prepared for when they eventually find out what you have kept from them anyway. They will likely understand once they have kids themselves, but that may also perpetuate a cycle of not being honest, and maybe their kids will need that honesty, you never know.

 

[Rhea]

I wish you all the luck in the world with your kids, and I certainly understand how hard it can be to admit to them that you have done things that were wrong. They won't be kids forever though, so be prepared for when they eventually find out what you have kept from them anyway. They will likely understand once they have kids themselves, but that may also perpetuate a cycle of not being honest, and maybe their kids will need that honesty, you never know.

I think that because generally speaking we are quite open and honest, the kids know they can get whatever details are useful. It's not like an atmosphere of "I know best, you obey or else," which I agree is very likely to result in poor decision making for the kids.

We've talked about things in the past, like a TV show I didn't want my daughter to watch, where the reason was, "I think this has a strong potential to give you disturbing memories that you will never be able to un-do. So I ask you to wait until you have much more experience about love, security, statistics and safety before you watch 'Criminal Minds.' I worry that it will keep you up on many nights and create a sense of anxiety that you can't just turn off because of it's depiction of truly dangerous people as something that can happen _every_week_."

And they've heard me frequently talk about the contrast between my husband's path to adulthood and my path, and how Dad's way resulted in more fun overall and more security to ensure the fun. So they know there are many bad choices that were made. But hiding the details is like that TV show for a 12 year old. You won't benefit from having those images in your head, and you might suffer from them.

And in that context they know I'm not keeping stuff from them because I find it hard to talk about or admit that I did it, but because I think it's a terrible idea to think of it as acceptable and have it floating about in your head as "didn't do any harm." They do know they can ask anything, and if I'm not going to answer in detail they'll get a logical reason why not. And they also know they will get lots of information offered without asking - often more than they care to listen to. All that to say that I think one can be perfectly honest and also keep some information out of the discussion as not helpful to growth.

 

[ronburgundy]

Depends on your past. People are impacted more by personal anecdotes and stories than by more informative statistics. If your past is full of high risk, foolish choices, but you got lucky and escaped any negative impacts from them, they might not be a good story to tell. It will count more toward their view of risks than any abstract hypothetical or stats about the real risks you might throw at them. Heck, you might even want to embellish not to make yourself look better but worse, and add some harsh negative consequences to your actions.