My eldest daughter has not gone off the deep end as far as I know, but has drank excessively enough for me to worry about her triggering the alcoholism gene she may have inherited from her mother's side and tried smoking despite seeing and hearing about it's ill effects in relatives. We talked to her a lot. I talked to her about my occasional use of pot in college, why I turned down most chances to do it, and why I wouldn't do it at all now in her situation. My wife was firmly against it and discussed how she felt it lead her father and brothers to harder drugs. My wife also emphasized that one pot charge on her record could ruin Brandy's chance to be a teacher. Brandy combined all that with data from her peers to conclude "pot's no big deal". She graduated with high honors from high school and was a straight A student until mid junior high. Growing up almost everyone including me thought she was a near perfect child. Our one worry was what we thought was a mild tendency to be selfish. Now we worry about her constantly. She got a big wake up call when her neighbors got busted for dealing pot, but I havn't seen much of a change in her attitude toward school or an increase in pragmatic skills so I'm not sure it's sticking. Let's not even go into the boyfriend choices.

Course it could be my fault for naming her after the combination of my favorite alcoholic spirit and one of my favorite songs - "Brandy you're a fine girl". My real concern is that while we did plenty of talking, we may have been over protective and didn't let her try and fail enough on her own. I've gone from a smug attitide that parenting isn't really all that hard just, love, discipline and communication to the classic where did we go wrong? And then there's that little pain in the ass voice in my mind saying are you just as over reactive as you were over protective earlier?

Regards,
Mark