Your kid leaves her phone lying around. You find the scatterbrain never bothered to change her password as you guiltily break into her phone. You follow the trail of texts from last Saturday night. The slang is beyond you but Google translates. Shocked you find the supposed naïf and her friends were trying score some pot and booze from the cool crowd in school.
How should you respond?
You immediately want to go Putin-style hard on her ass. Confrontation, grounding, extra math classes. But any confrontation will likely reveal you accessed her phone. The stakes will only increase. Password changes, another phone purchased with the proceeds from the baby-sitting business..who knows where it will all end up?
You think through your strategy. Before this crisis, your threshold for the gateway drug was caffeine. So no Coca Cola has crossed the girl’s lips. But it seems she’s graduated from Izzes to Corona. Surely that worse than Coca Cola so you should come down like a ton of bricks? But one thing is certain – your access to her secret life is over because she’ll close off the information superhighway. How will you know if and when she’s “chasing the dragon” as people apparently said when you were young? You realize your threshold for intervention is coke (the drug) not Coca Cola. Just keep an eye on her messages till you see “yeyo” and then intervene.
You contemplate home schooling. You head over to the liquor cabinet and fix yourself a Scotch. Straight, no chaser.
Cheap Talk 
3 comments
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April 14, 2014 at 2:27 pm
yarbel
Love this post. A good strategy would probably resemble that of the corrupt police officer who have obtained illegal evidence of wrongdoing (e.g.. The Shield, The Wire, and every other possible TV show): use your illicit information channel to find a link to physical evidence, get a hold of that evidence, and then Putinize.
* not that I think that a small amount of weed/alcohol is necessarily bad
April 16, 2014 at 11:52 am
niko
Ummmm, or you bring up the topic of drugs and alcohol generically, as a family discussion that parents feel they should have with teenagers (you can say you were prompted by the PTA), regardless of knowledge of use. Making it clear what is on/off limits, what dangers are present, what you did at a similar age, what problems it caused you or friends, etc. is a perfectly mature (i.e. non-Putinical) way to deal with this situation. I see the tongue-in-cheek tag, but want to make it clear this post is NOT the way to deal with the stated situation.
April 29, 2014 at 1:39 am
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