Prom Night: Do I Trust My Teen—or My Instincts?

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Reena Ninan:
He intends to go to a house that’s two hours away with his friend group for a prom after party. There will be no adult supervision.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Kids die under circumstances like this. The kid is also saying, “If you say no, I’m not going to prom and I will be depressed.”

Reena Ninan:
Is there a way to say no without permanently damaging the relationship?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, this is really hard parenting, but I would stand by it.

Reena Ninan:
Oh my gosh. 25 years later, I still remember the anxiety leading up to prom. Nobody wanted to take me to prom. Mrs. Jackson, high school teacher, had to sort me out with one of my dear friends and we were just good friends all through high school and David took me to the prom. I had an awesome red beaded dress that I still wish I had to show my daughter, but mom threw it away at some point, donated to Goodwill. But do you have fond memories of prom?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Not really. Actually, I think Reena, given that you seem to have had a really good time and I’m very grateful for Ms. Jackson setting you up, you may be one of the few people in our age group who actually enjoyed prom. I think if you generally ask people about prom, they’re like, “Eh, it was overrated. I got all excited and it wasn’t that great.” So I’m glad. I’m glad.

Reena Ninan:
Well, I’m looking at prom now from different eyes with kids in high school. I want to read you this letter, which really sets out a lot of things that parents worry about.
Hi, Dr. Lisa. I need your help. Prom is coming up fast and my son has what I believe to be an unreasonable expectation. Let me say that he has always been a responsible, reliable young man. He has never once caused my husband or me to mistrust him. That being said, he’s shared with my husband and me that he intends to go to a house that’s two hours away with his friend group for a prom after party. There will be no adult supervision. Apparently, someone has rented both the house and buses on behalf of the teens. He’s expressed that he will not go to prom and will be quote depressed if we don’t allow him to attend this after party with his entire friend group. I have checked in with a few other parents. They all seem to be okay with this scenario. Am I overreacting? I tend to run a bit anxious, cautious with my kids. This whole scenario makes me quite uncomfortable though. Please help. I don’t want him to miss out on a big milestone memory, but I think this is a reach. Thank you for your help.
So what’s your initial reaction here?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. Well, my initial reaction is we’re talking about a very small segment of the population that can afford this kind of stuff. And I just want to say that out of the gate. You’re renting a bus, you’re renting a place. All the same Reena. I do hear about stuff like this and I also am really confident that as we think it through, and this is one I’m going to have to really think through, we’re going to get to sort of some bigger principles because I think these kinds of tensions show up across the economic spectrum of teenagers wanting to do stuff that the parents are like, “Are you kidding me?” But the parent feeling unsure. But that’s my initial reaction. My next thought is like, okay, you haven’t sent a kid to prom. I’ve done that. Your kids are coming up on prom before sooner rather than later. As someone who hasn’t been in the soup of this yet as a parent, what’s your gut reaction to this kid’s hopes to go do this thing?

Reena Ninan:
I think this is common. Like you have a lot of kids that might not have pushed the envelope. They make prom to be this big thing. It sounds like it still is a very big thing to kids still. And then you have this one night where everyone wants to let loose. But the thing here, Lisa, in the letter the parent says, “Look, this is a really good kid who’s never had us question or mistrust him.” But I do worry that sometimes these big moments that lead up and everyone, whether it’s like a spring break, a prom, even super good kids can unravel. And I worry as a parent, is this the moment that maybe does them in?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Right. Kids die under circumstances like this. I mean, these are not small stakes. I really see where this parent is coming from. I’m not gearing to say, “Do not let this boy go.” I think this is really hard. I get it with this parent and I think this parent’s in quite a terrible spot because what we’re describing here is a very frightening confluence of variables, which is a whole bunch of teenagers with zero adult supervision and also two hours away from all of their adults. I think this is implicit in this, booze. You get a bus and go far away in order to drink. And the reason you have the bus is because you presume there will be drinking. Teenagers and booze and no adult supervision and two hours away from all their adults, none of that reads right for me as someone who’s cared for teenagers for a long time.
So I really get it why this parent’s like, “Are you kidding me?” And yet there’s all these reasons why they wrote, right? Why it wasn’t obvious that the answer is a no.

Reena Ninan:
Do you think though this mom is overreacting because she’s asking you here, “Dr. Lisa, am I overreacting on this?”

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I don’t think she’s overreacting. I actually think she’s by my index and I will just say my index of having cared for teenagers for a long time and knowing that good kids make dumb decisions sometimes and that if we look at the science, you get a bunch of kids together. There’s a great analogy. There’s a great phrase of like, on girls, sometimes things degrade to the meanest among boys, sometimes things degrade to the dumbest. You get a bunch of kids together and you don’t get the best thinking of a bunch of kids together at a party with booze far away from adults. That’s not when kids are going to be exercising their best judgment and we know that from the science. So I don’t think she’s overreacting. I also really feel for her that she’s like, “I called these other parents and they all seem okay with it.” I think if she hadn’t said that, I would have been like, “Well, the first thing I would do is to check to see if anybody else is having the same questions.” And I guess I will say sort of sorry to hear that she didn’t find a companion in this.

Reena Ninan:
Well, what do you do in a situation like that? She’s done her due diligence, right? And she’s checked and I see why she’s saying, “Am I overreacting here? This doesn’t feel right internally. My alarm clock is going off.” But if the other parents are all on board and your kid wants to be part of it and you look like you’re the one holding them back, but you are really concerned about safety. You’ve always said, Lisa, safety is the one thing we shouldn’t compromise on. What’s your advice for her?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, okay. The kid is also saying, “If you say no, I’m not going to prom and I will be depressed.” So the kid is also taken off the table like, “Why don’t you go to prom, have a good time with your friends and then come home.” Now she said it’s coming up. There’s still time. And I totally get it that this kid is going to try to get to the party with his friends. And I also get it in the same way that I’m like, every adult I know was disappointed by prom, I think teenagers build up prom. It becomes this wonderful last blast with your friends. So I get it why this kid is saying things that are going to make them feel bad if they say no. I still don’t think it’s an easy yes.
I think there’s a lot that needs to be considered. One is I wonder, I know this sounds sort of like a Hail Mary. I wonder if she, did she call all the parents involved and make sure they’re okay with it? Because I think sometimes people will start to fold. And I remember one time with my older daughter when she was in the seventh grade, she came home and she was like, “I’m going to go see the movie It,” which is like this super creepy horror movie with this particular friend of hers. I was like, “Are you serious?” And she’s like, “Oh yeah, no, no, we’re totally going.” And I happened to know the mother of the friend. And so I called and I’m like, “I’m hearing that the girls are going to go see It.” And the mom was like, “Oh no, they’re not.” I’m like, “Okay, good.” So I found the person, the other parent that made it easy to be like, “No, this is silly.” So I do wonder if there’s another layer of calls that could make it a little easier. I do wonder if then a next step is just to say to the boy, “This is really a frightening set of events. This is a frightening confluence of variables. I don’t feel confident that you’re going to be safe there and your safety’s the thing, the thing, the thing.”

Reena Ninan:
It’s the risk versus missing out, right? So how do we weigh that?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. Well, so I think based on what’s in the letter, I think the kid will be like, “I won’t do anything crazy. I won’t do anything dumb. I won’t drink. I won’t get caught up.” And his track record indicates as much. We also know there’s hot reasoning and cold reasoning, cold reasoning, talking to your parents who say one thing, you mean it, you get into the situation something else happens. I do wonder, there’s no way a kid would be like, “Yeah, that’s great.” I do wonder if a parent says, “I’m going to need to know that you’re safe. I’m going to need to … If you are dead set on doing this and if we’ve got the resources, I’m going to rent a place half mile down the road and we’re going to be there.” Again, you have to have a lot of resources to do that, but I don’t think that this is something where you let go easy on the idea that kids can just underage drink far from adults with, frankly, and this is something we got to think through, with a lot of support from adults to be involved in underage drinking far from adults.That’s a piece of this.

Reena Ninan:
We had this episode 138, should our teens stay home alone when we leave town and you talk about, as you mentioned, hot and cold reasoning. I think the thing though is it’s the parents saying yes versus the parent overreacting and how do you make that whole when I can’t imagine you’ve offered an option of being half a mile away and you’d be there. Part of the point of prom is you feel like, “All right, we’re going on to the next chapter. We’re adults. We can handle this.” And you talk about the hot and cold reasoning and I also worry about the cops coming and it doesn’t matter who drank and who hasn’t. And I know we’ve talked about kids, they’re having sex less and I’m not sure about drinking. Are they drinking less, Lisa?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think they are. But this feels to me like a drinking scenario. If you want my take, this feels like drinking. Yeah.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah. And I think that even if you aren’t drinking, what makes it even more worrisome for me is like, this is the moment. If you’ve never drank before, you’re going to drink now, which means, oh my God, this is the worst moment. But if everybody else in the community is okay with this, is there anything a parent can do to set some guardrails? Well, if you call the other parent who’s organizing it, right? This just sounds like a disaster. They’re just doing something. If I’m the parent organizing and I feel like I’m doing something great for the community and then here’s the party pooper who’s calling to rain on my parade.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, that’s right. I mean, that’s a position in which this parent’s being put, but let’s take a minute on the parent who’s like, “I have a great idea. We’re going to rent a bus. We’re going to send them to this far away place.” And I promise you, Reena, that parent is like, “This is how they will be safe.” I mean, that one of the things that we really struggle with as clinicians is that all parents worry about their kids’ safety, but parents come to different conclusions about how to maintain safety. So some parents are like, “You will not drink underage and you’re not going to be put in positions where you will be surrounded by underage drinking and feel inclined to do it.” So that’s how some parents roll on this. And then there are other parents who are like, “You’re going to drink because it’s prom, but I don’t want you driving. I don’t want you running around town, whatever.” So for those parents, this is the safety plan. And I think that that’s part of why there’s so much tension here is that all of the parents involved in this feel that they’re doing the right thing in the name of kids’ safety. Okay. On this, we have data about who is keeping kids safer and what we know is it’s actually not safe to support underage drinking. We know that.
When adults endorse underage drinking, it does not keep kids drinking safer in the moment. Well, it may because there’s some sense of parameters around it, but I’m not saying I recommend it, but what we know is it actually leads to more drinking down the line and more problems with alcohol down the line. The theory that, oh, if you just normalize drinking, then they actually won’t, it won’t be like this forbidden fruit, they won’t go crazy with it.
That theory in no way holds up in the data. So if I go at this from like a straight, what does the data say? Creating conditions where teenagers can drink does not actually isn’t good for them. It’s just not good for them. But, oh, this poor kid, right? All his friends.

Reena Ninan:
I know. And the kids said, “I’ll be depressed if I can’t go.” That was a direct quote. So how does the parent respond to that? I always get worried when there’s any mention of depression or anything like that.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. No, that’s really scary. That’s really scary. And we love our kids and we don’t want to see them upset and we want them to have a good time and also we don’t want them to be mad at us. I mean, that’s the other thing, right? If this parent does what frankly I would probably recommend, which is to be like, “Buddy, no, that’s a bridge too far. That’s seventh grade It. No.” He may actually be very, very down about it. You don’t develop clinical depression over something like this unless you already were geared for depression, but he may be upset about it for a while. He may be very unpleasant to live with between the time of the no and who knows how long. And that’s actually very powerful for parents where they’re like, “I don’t want to live with a kid who’s so mad at me.”
Right now, they’re sitting on two horrible choices as it is constructed right now. One, roll the dice, put this kid in a situation I would not want my own kid in, to be honest. The other is shut it down, see if this kid actually sticks to his like, “Well, I’m not even going to prom and I’m going to be depressed and I’m going to be miserable.” Those are horrible options. Those are two horrible options. So I guess what I would say as the parent in this is basically putting it on the table that way in front of the kid. The two choices in front of us are completely lousy. I don’t like either. What else do we have? What other options are available to us? I am not solving this, Reena, but I am saying we cannot feel that we are cornered by teenagers.
I feel very strongly about that. Kids who want to go have a drinking party two hours from home do not get to dictate how things go in our own homes. We should be able to come up with other options and push our kids to come up with other options.

Reena Ninan:
How can you say no? Let’s say you’re like absolutely no way you just know this is not what you’re going to do. Is there a way to say no without permanently damaging your relationship? Because you talk about connection, right? And you’ve said in previous podcasts over seasons when there’s been a conflict with another parent and a child, you’ve warned us that you don’t want to go for the jugular for the parent because that could then ruin maybe your relationship with your kid, which is very, very important, right?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah.

Reena Ninan:
So how do you maybe say no without ruining that relationship?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Right. And not only do you feel like the kid’s going to be upset and maybe never forgive me, but also like these are presumably high school seniors, right? This is the last way you want to send your kid off to college is like all angry with you. I think that the order of events I would pursue if I were this parent is, first of all, there have to be other options, right? There absolutely have to be other options. And the kinds of options, if the parent starts to say like, “I’m not good with either one of these, what else we got?” Teenagers can get kind of creative and it is within the realm of possibility that a teenager might be like, “Okay, fine, this is my backup friendship group, but they’re going to go play ski ball down the street.” And you’re like, “Great. Have a blast with them.” So I wouldn’t have this current state of affairs be the last word.
I would ask if there’s any other state of affairs. If the kid is like, “No, this is it. Either I stay home grumpy or I go to this party, this thing far away,” if you have to get to a no, I think then you say, “It is breaking my heart, but it feels to me so unsafe. And if we can come up with no other option besides this one, I cannot say yes to it. I will turn myself inside out to come up with other options where you can have a good time and I can be assured of your safety. I hate saying no to you about this. I get it if you are angry with me about this, but if something went wrong and the stakes are so high and the chances of things going wrong are so good here, I don’t know how I could live with myself. And so I have to say no.”
Okay, this is really hard parenting. This is like sleeves rolled up. Nobody wants to do this parenting, but I would stand by it.

Reena Ninan:
I did not think about walking them through that fear that I guess I assume is obvious to everybody that I don’t need to walk you through, but you’re saying you might need to explain that bridge too far in your mind that you worry about to get them to see why you’re acting this way.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Absolutely. And Reena, this is where like, let me tell you the stories like this, let me like some war stories from being a clinician. The list of things that could go wrong here. One is a kid drinks a lethal amount of alcohol. Another is there’s enough drinking going on that something happens … There’s also, I presume it’s a co-ed group, right? Kids spending the night together away from adults without supervision. We’re not even talking about that piece, which is a lot of families are not going to be okay with that. And there is some sexual interaction where questions of consent are very, very murky because not everybody’s sober. Either the kid is a participant to it or is somehow around when it happens and has to live with that knowledge. Let’s say the kid himself doesn’t have a problem with alcohol, but somebody else has a terrible problem with alcohol and they’re calling ambulances.
I mean, these are all things that happen under conditions like this.

Reena Ninan:
This is such a duh moment, Lisa. Duh, of course, but I never think to talk to my child about … I don’t know why you’re just making me realize the importance of having this conversation. It doesn’t even have to be right before prom. It should be at any point that you feel that they’re old enough to start talking about it because I guess I never talk to them about my fears, right? I don’t put that on them and I think they need to understand why that is so important and I worry to give perspective. Whether they take it or understand it, that’s another thing. But it brings me to another thing I do want to ask you about. Moments like these, whether it’s a spring break or a prom or whatever, when you’re trying to teach your children about freedom and the limits and how families handle hard calls, what’s your advice?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, it’s interesting because I really am thinking through like, okay, so what we’re talking about is a scenario that involves a fair bit of privilege to be able to have it happen, but what are the big ideas that apply across all things? And I think what we’re getting to is the kids’ fantasy of what this thing is going to be like. “No, we’re just going to all be having a great time connecting wonderful end of high school, say goodbye, last hurrah, party.” Of course, that’s the kid’s fantasy. It sounds great. And that part of the job, it’s funny, we were talking last episode about not wanting to ruin things for kids. Sometimes part of the job is to be like, “Well, it could go that way, but also with all my life experience, it could also go all of these other ways.” And so that’s why we’re going to have to have a really hard conversation.
And that could come up with a kid wanting to do something in the local neighborhood that sounds great to them in their wonderful, exuberant, adolescent way and that we as adults have to be the kind of party poopers. We do have to be party poopers sometimes.

Reena Ninan:
And we shouldn’t be afraid to have to do that when their safety’s involved.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
No.
And I just want to be really empathic that it’s very hard when other adults are endorsing stuff that in the cold light of day, like I know from experience, this is dangerous. This is just dangerous and a tough position to put kids in. But I don’t envy this family’s position at all and what I’m counting on Reena, I believe this kid is every bit as wonderful and mature and decent and thoughtful as they say he is. And so I am counting on that being an asset they have in these conversations, that as they start to lay out like, “It would be great if it went this way, but what if it goes this way?” That the kid will be like, “Okay, fine. I’ll go bowling with my friends here in town or something.”

Reena Ninan:
Yeah, figure out something else.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think that would be the outcome I would be hoping for.

Reena Ninan:
I just think it’s really hard because every family is different. Every family has their own rules. They have their own … And raising kids is so hard. I’ve actually become very good at putting shutters on because everybody does things differently and I say that to my kids, but it is really hard when you have these big moments and you want to trust them with the freedom. You want them to have great memories and feel like they’re part of a community, but you’ve taught me one thing and if you’ve taught me one thing, the one thing is safety above all else.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
This is the hard part of my job is I have cared for really, really grim situations and involving questions of sexual consent and kids who get killed in driving accidents and kids who go to the ER. Usually on this podcast, I’m like, “Oh no, it’s fine. Everybody’s overreacting.” And so when I get to these places where I’m like, “Ugh, man, I just do not, this does not sit right.” It’s just because of what I’ve seen, it’s just that.

Reena Ninan:
What do you have for us for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So this is heavy, but I think what this letter highlights, I think for parents across the board is you have to be okay with your kid being upset with you and I think that that is a really hard thing in raising teenagers. I think it’s a really hard thing in raising kids who are getting ready to go to college and you’re already trying to hold on to the relationship you’ve got with them. But I know that it hamstrings high quality parenting if the goal is that your kid’s never mad at you. You have to be able to tolerate your kid being cranky with you and then also when they are cranky, you have to not hold a grudge about it. Usually kids will be cranky for a while and then if the parent is like, “Yeah, I get you’re mad and I bums me out.” If the parent doesn’t make it any bigger than it has to be, often the kid will let it go and then you can move forward together again. But you can’t be scared of your kid being mad at you.

Reena Ninan:
Wow, because if I’m being honest, I think there are moments that all of us feel like we don’t want that relationship to be damaged, but-

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Nobody does.

Reena Ninan:
You’re right to raise this. Lisa, thank you so much.
Lisa, next week we are going to talk about studying from partying to studying. We’re going to talk a litle bit about what do you do if your kid really doesn’t seem to know how to study? Is this executive functioning? What do parents need to know for kids who struggle with studying?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. And with finals around the corner, this is something we’re going to want to hit.

Reena Ninan:
I’m looking forward to this one. I’ll se you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll see you next week.