Letter to My Friend (A Writing Exercise for Practicing Accessibility in Scholarship)

In a course on communication and persuasion this semester, we were asked to write a letter to a friend about how to prevent children from becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol using the Theory of Planned Behavior. This letter was the submission; it has been edited based on feedback from the professor.

My dear friend. It has been a joy and an honor to be so close to you through your journey of trying to conceive and then to eventually giving birth to Keegan. It’s been equally amazing watching him grow up from a little soft squishy baby into an almost two year old who has begun to develop his own personality. As you know, I’ve been questioning whether or not I want a child since the pandemic, and watching you and Keegan together has certainly helped keep my otherwise negative attitude at bay. Speaking of attitudes, as you know I’m taking a class on communication and persuasion, and we’re talking about people’s attitudes and their behaviors, the underlying assumption being that if we can understand and measure people’s attitudes better, we’re more likely to be able to change or predict behaviors. The persuasion component, of course, is the rhetorical and cultural stuff, where I like to dwell.

I recently came across a fascinating article about attachment theory and the theory of planned behavior. It was about how factors like trust, communications and nonalienation (being good/kind/nice/decent) to your child all correlated to attitudes and risk behaviors like drinking (2)—AND how these same mechanisms are at play in peer group behavior. This article, which was about drinking, had me thinking about all of our lovely talks over wine — and how at various times we’ve struggled with alcoholism. I know that you, like me, are probably very conscientious about how you raise Keegan when it comes to matters like drinking. I pondered this a while before deciding, I know what I’ll do! I’ll write to her from all the way down the block and tell her that I came up with some rules for in case I ever decide to have kids. I wanted to share them with you. 

First and foremost, and this may seem rather obvious but I think bears saying, make sure he has friends. Some children grow up isolated and struggle because they’re kept too close to the family unit by overprotective parents. I thought about my own mother and how her social insecurities and anxieties led to me not only having cut off, stagnated friendships with childhood friends, it led to an overreliance on her. This can, paradoxically, “produce a risky shift to overreliance on peers engaged in nonnormative behaviors" (2) once a kid becomes a young adult. It certainly did me! And so I have to compliment you on your attentive engagement with Keegan’s social needs. Not only have you ensured that he is cultivating friends his own age, he’s heading to day care now—a scary milestone in your relationship, but one that you know is necessary. You’re doing amazing, I think because you understand that parenting is more than just food, clothing, shelter, and basic emotional support—there is a tremendous amount of emotional and intellectual labor required of you to ensure that his early years are not fraught with bad messaging. 

As we know well and have discussed many times, there’s still a lot of talk about whether or not raising the age to 21 led to a reduction in teenage and adolescent drinking, in spite of strong data to suggest it. I know we’ve talked about how it’s hard not to want to approach it the “Mediterranean way” and let them have a sip or two with dinner at a certain time in their late childhood (fourteen or fifteen), but I now wonder if that interferes with this notion of “violitional control” the article brought up. Is raising a kid to see drinking, even in moderation, going to perpetuate a notion that any kind of drinking is acceptable, healthy behavior—or will the child grasp the fact that the moderation is the keyword. Like any behavior, the context is what establishes all of the other variable at play. This is where ideas like “modeling good behavior” come from; it is entirely possible that it also re-fetishizes it.  

Anyway, this matters because it’s a both/and—it’s not an either/or—in terms of the way children with healthy relationships with their mothers have healthy relationships with their peers. While this survey was conducted using young adults, I don’t have to tell you with the recent things going on in my life with Iñaki, perhaps there’s truth to this all the way to mid-life crisis time! He and I both have unhealthy relationships with our mothers that led us to have two different attachment disorders: mine being attachment abandonment fear, and his being attachment avoidant personality. Another confession: can I tell you how much I hate that this article was so focused on mothers? How difficult it is to sit here and blame women who are forced by our patriarchal society to bear impossible unequal burdens in the raising of the child to then get “the blame” for how they are raised? It’s the product of a sick culture of colonialism that we are still living in. So I hope you understand that, as I write all of this, I very much understand that there’s more to it than that, and we cannot simply blame the mothers and then sit smugly while not attending to the fact that it is the absence of other parental roles (most often a “father” figure) which we might more correctly say is really to blame. 

This brings me to my next self-assessment-as-advice, but it’s complicated; because trust, communication, and acceptance are all interconnected like a web, I could have a good communication system with my mother (which I do), but not trust her (which I do not). It seems to me these are tied to acceptance, or even the belief that my mother will accept me for who I am, because without trust and communication, I am unlikely to even think that I will be accepted. My point here is: make sure Keegan always trusts you, make sure you always leave open pathways for communication, and always be accepting of him whoever he turns out to be. What’s great, of course, about this part is of writing the letter: you’re already doing this! You were ready to be a mom, and I cannot help but think about how many women simply do not have the time, the money, the opportunity to prepare for such a role—often through no fault of their own. My main point here is simply that I think showing acceptance and kindness goes a long way to building trust; in other words, the three are recursively circulating with each other. 

But the thing is, according to this research, the indirect effects of a secure maternal attachment relationship were better correlates with behavior, meaning that focusing on alcohol beliefs rather than micromanaging their alcohol use is a better approach to teaching Keegan about the safest ways to consume alcohol. One way I think we already do this, is by ‘cheersing’ when we drink. Showing that alcohol consumption is normal in moderate amounts and associated with social activities and joy may help him understand how to have a healthy relationship with it himself (like modeling behavior) and thus become less likely to turn to the bottle as an isolating coping mechanism. It makes me wonder, though, about consuming behavior alone in front of a child. That reminds me of the second health practice that he learns (though a good cheers is a great reason all on its own): that drinking should accompany food. Not just in the utilitarian or biological sense that having food on one’s stomach is a good way to “soak up all that alcohol,” but the fact that there are also social norms that it creates. Are young adults less likely to associate drinking with a shameful taboo without an awareness that they need to eat before they go to their first college party? I don’t know, but if he’s going to be around alcohol, it seems like modeling good behavior (like drinking only during meals) is not a bad way to go because of how attitudes and beliefs are shaped by behavioral modeling, according to the Theory of Planned Behavior. . 

Having a good relationship with Keegan can also “foster healthy beliefs about separation and individuation” (7). I guess this is because if he knows that you’re going to be there for him, he’s more willing to explore things on his own without worrying about you, and that allows him more cognitive alone time to become himself. Now, as I’m writing this, you should know that I’m imagining him running around in the wildflower field on the way down to Wyman Park Drive just smiling away, secure in the knowledge that you’re a supportive, loving parental unit who will be there for him when he gets back. 

I don’t have a very good transition to the next thing, which is that in spite of the importance of friendships, there’s something to the old adage: be careful of the company you keep. That is an aphorism that apparently has scientific validity too, because kids who get too close to certain peers—those who partake in certain behaviors, perhaps those who did not have good models for parents—are heavily influenced by their behavior. Now I know if we were talking about this in person, you’d say “okay, well that’s so obvious!” But, the more I think about it the more I think our culture and values shape a lot of this in a different direction. Liberals tend to “be accepting of people no matter what” and try to live by the rule that they “do not judge lest ye be judged.” How many people do we know with kids who approach it like, “let kids be kids” or “they’re smart enough to make the right decision.” While that’s a nice idea, the fact is, hubris may be getting in the way of reality: the kids need to have a pretty decent monitor of who their friends are. Since it’s easy to imagine how this can also be used to keep prejudices enforced, think of keeping Keegan away from certain kinds of other kids who exhibit problematic behaviors, rather than on arbitrary and irrelevant demographic differences like race, class, or gender. Those kids cultural, ethical, moral attitudes based on their environments are much more indicative of bad behavior later. Kids who kill squirrels and rip the wings off butterflies? Gotta keep ‘em away. Kids who disobey their parents intentionally to act out? Problematic, too. One thing that we know from the Theories of Planned Behavior and Reasoned Action is that if Keegan has healthy parental attachments, the influence of problematic friends will be blunted. 

Now, as he gets older, it’s important to remember that it all goes back to a lot of the data we heard about when we were in college: binge drinking is fun when it’s taboo, when it’s “contraband” (8). I dunno about you, but that seems like an aspect of culture that seems to have a lot of correlatives with many different cultures. It’s fun to be bad sometimes, to test boundaries. Perhaps that’s why it’s important to go back to early childhood and start there with Keegan, to show him that he doesn’t have to fear you when he does something wrong, that there are no really serious consequences for small infractions, and—most importantly—to show him that alcohol isn’t special or exceptional in a way that should warrant him wanting to consume it excessively to act out or show off. I guess another way to say it might be that you have to do a bit of “reverse psychology” and not make it a bigger deal than it really is. Then, neither shame and stigma, nor fascination and fetish, can come into significant play as Keegan grows into a strong, healthy, happy human.

My dear, it’s begun to rain now. So I’ll have to finish up my letter soon. All studies have their limitations, as you know, so it’s important to say here that the research was from self-reported data. Do you think college students would be honest about how much they drink? Were you? Was I? I think if you’d asked me my freshmen year, when I was struggling with my sexuality and still an evangelical Christian, I would have lied about how much alcohol I was drinking (not to mention how much dick I was sucking). So I’m not sure how reliable it is. Is the inclusion of the mother figure (absent any discussion of the father) a leading question built into the very study, with the assumption that we all are products of our mothers to some degree more than our fathers and their influence (what I’ll call the “U.S. cliffs notes version of Freud)? The researchers fussed over what certain measurements of units of alcohol might mean to young people without much experience drinking, but I think the idea that kids don’t know about “mommy and daddy” issues from the vast cultural media apparatus that consumes and subsumes them daily is a bit of a bigger issue. 

Anyway, I touched on talking to Keegan openly and honestly, creating a trusting environment for him to live in (I actually believe that’s something that’s front of mind for you, which is awesome to see), and being careful about how you discipline him. We can make a lot of jokes about “liberal parents” here, but the evidence seems clear, as much as any radical punk or reactionary fundamentalist might not like it: explaining to your kids how to have healthy relationships (with both people and things) and make healthy choices (about people and things) by teaching them boundary setting techniques, while simultaneously letting them know that you are going to love them and be there for them unconditionally, no matter what, and that your punishments, therefore, are not going to be overly severe, goes a long way to raising happy and healthy children that don’t fuck up their own lives or our society. So, you know, in other words: stay liberal. ;-)