Smoking marijuana is not the sort of habit that parents want for their kids to have. For most parents, smoking weed is a bad habit that they fear can turn into a gateway drug to worse habits that will lead them down the wrong path or towards a bad lifestyle.
How to help someone to quit smoking weed? This is a question that plenty of parents ask but find no answers for. Here are a few pieces of advice that can help parents to get their teenager to quit smoking cannabis.
1) Remaining calm
The worst thing that a parent can do is to go ballistic. A lot of parents, and understandably so, tend to freak out or go off the wall on their kids the moment they find out that the latter are smoking weed. This doesn’t help the situation and might only aggravate it. Stay calm and talk to the child properly.
A parent should seek to first understand their child. Getting outright mad will only serve to strain the parent child relationship and might even push the kid away. This will make the communicating with them more difficult and is inimical towards the goal of helping a teenager to quit smoking marijuana.
Parents should stay calm and talk to their teenage kid as casually as possible. Making too big a deal out of the issue might scare them away from talking about the issue.
2) Talking to them and finding out why they enjoy smoking weed
The first thing that should be done is to understand why their loved one even smokes weed in the first place. Is this person just experimenting with drugs? Do they just need something to help them reduce or manage their stress and anxiety levels?
Trying to tell a loved one to quit marijuana without trying to understanding why they smoke it in the first place can be offensive to the user. For them, the person telling them to quit might come off as someone who thinks they are stupid and incapable of making sound lifestyle choices.
Want to learn how to help someone to quit smoking weed? Understanding why they smoke is the first step.
3) Understanding the why and educating oneself
For example, if a person is simple experimenting with marijuana then parents should be able to clearly explain the possible dangers of the substance, without coming off as authoritative. Remember, curiosity is normal among teenagers and experimenting satisfies the need that teenagers have to exercise autonomy. Attempts to hinder their kids either tends to make teenagers want to do the exact opposite of what parents actually want for them.
There are plenty of different reasons why people smoke marijuana. Those who want their loved ones to quit should educate themselves on the best approach or strategy to convince their loved one to quit smoking cannabis.
Want to learn how to help someone quit smoking weed? Find out why they do it and then read up on the right strategy to use. Understand that there is no one strategy that really works for every scenario. More often than not, people end up learning the right method along the way.