Prevention Makes a Difference: Meet Chris Kelly, Part One

Recently, I connected with Chris Kelly and was impressed with his teaching method and the work that he is doing in the schools to help kids make better choices. Chris sat down with me to share his thoughts about prevention, teen drug, and alcohol use and his prevention education classes, workshops, and assemblies.

Can you share your background and why you decided to start Prevention PLUS? What do you hope to accomplish with the organization?

When I was about four or five years clean and sober, I was doing lots of volunteer work, speaking to addicts in prisons and hospitals. Somebody mentioned to me, “Too bad you couldn’t do that work for a living”

It wasn’t less than a few months later I saw an ad for an organization that wanted to hire ex-addicts and alcoholics to be prevention teachers. I got hired in 1994 by a large, international nonprofit prevention agency and was trained as a prevention specialist and then was sent for fifteen years all around the world to do prevention education.

I worked in inner-city ghetto schools, I worked in the finest prep and boarding schools in America. I worked with schools in Europe, Asia, and South America, always doing prevention education.

I’ve worked with children as young as kindergarten and as old as college, but most of the work was for middle and high school kids.

After doing that work for many years, I left that organization because of some philosophical disagreements about the way they were doing things and founded my own educational nonprofit, Prevention PLUS.

While the around the world educating was interesting and fascinating, it was also exhausting and so now I have most of my clients in California or Hawaii, the two states that I spend most of my time in. Usually, schools hire me for a week at a time.

I really feel that I did not get any good information about what alcohol or drug addiction was when I was a child or a teenager, not at school and not from my parents. I think prevention does help reduce the number of addicts we will have in the world.

I love your line “We don’t tell your kids WHAT to think. We ask them to PLEASE THINK before they make their decisions about tobacco, alcohol, and other  drugs.” Can you explain why you have chosen this approach and why it is effective?

I believe one of the worst things you can do in doing prevention education is to tell kids not to drink or not to smoke or not to use drugs because I think a normal part of adolescence development stages is to be rebellious and to go against the rules. I am against saying “Don’t drink” or “Don’t use drugs.”

What I try and do is to tell them reasons why drinking or using drugs might not be a good idea, ask them to think about goals, values, things that they care about, and ask them to ponder whether using substances will help them get to the goals and things that you want to achieve.

I give them factual information about drugs and alcohol to break up some of the myths they hear from pop culture and their peer group and to be a con to the amazing amount of pro information about tobacco and alcohol they get from the corporations.

Giving them information, encouraging them to think about their own lives and their own values is going to enable some of them to make much better choices, certainly better choices than I made.

What have you learned from the experience? Can you share some memorable stories?

One of the things I’ve learned is that if you can connect with the kid’s concerns for others whether they are users or nonusers, you can really do a tremendous amount of educating.

In every school, there might be a kid who is a total pothead, burnout, whatever you want to call him, and he is actually worried about somebody who he thinks is worse than him or her.

When you teach kids about intervening, about speaking up, about setting boundaries, about how to get help for somebody you care about, you are connecting to everybody; the nonusers, the experimenters, and even the hardcore users sometimes.

Connecting the people’s innate concern for others has been a really powerful way of creating a dialogue and the kids can see that you are united with them and not in opposition with them. 

Quite often, you think, what am I going to say to the kid who smokes weed every day. He might smoke weed five times a day, but he is worried about his friend, Billy who smokes it eight times a day.

Everybody has what they think is okay and what they think is worrisome. By talking about what your worries are, and what have you done about them, it creates an alliance between the health educator and the adolescent. It is key to building communication.

In my parent workshops, I say, “How many of you sitting here in this workshop know information about another parent’s child that your child told you, you overheard it, or you found evidence and you are sitting on that information because you are afraid that they will want to kill the messenger?”

Some of them absolutely know who is getting drunk every weekend, and who is on meth and they are not saying anything. Sometimes it’s because their child has sworn them to secrecy.

When parents bring up that issue, I have to ask them, “Did you give blanket secrecy before you knew what the secret was that you were willing to keep.”

There are times when blanket policies don’t really work. You find out a kid has had three overdoses of pills and you are going to sit on that information and what, wait for the fourth time when they don’t get revived? You and your child may wish you had made a different choice than secrecy.

I’m always asking people to look at their own inner values and see if what they are doing in their external world is matching what they feel inside.

I’ve heard parents say, “I’ve told my kid, no matter what, just call me for a ride and I’ll come to get you”

That sounds fine, it’s always a good policy. It’s all about getting the kid home safely. Sometimes kids interpret that to mean, I can drink, take drugs and do whatever I want and I won’t get in trouble as long as I call for a ride home. That is not always what the parent meant.

What parents quickly learn is that sometimes these kids are mini lawyers in the way they can debate, argue and manipulate, and so parents need to be on their game when they are making their families’ drug and alcohol policy and creating their family rules for safety.

One of the ways I frame it in class is that I say drugs and alcohol aren’t very safe, but it should be safe to talk about it. I let them know, “You are never going to get in trouble for any questions you ask. You never are going to get in trouble for sharing your opinion. You never are going to get in trouble for sharing a story or even about something that you have done.”

This is a health class. We are all safe. We are all able to talk. You can even disagree with me completely. You are still safe to say your opinion and in that atmosphere of safety, the students are able to confide, share, and be open.

I don’t blanket policy confidentiality with them anymore, because there are times when I’m so concerned about a student that I need to let a counselor, an administrator, a parent, or somebody know. I can’t just leave a community with some kid crying out for help and I haven’t helped them.

It is never going to be about getting anyone in trouble. I’m not there to discipline them. I’m not connected to law enforcement. I’m here to learn about health issues.

When I was in Holland, I had done a parent workshop. After I do a public forum and the parent Q & A, I always let parents know that I’ll stick around in case somebody has a question that’s more suited for private time.

A few parents stayed behind to ask questions. One woman came up and had been there from the very beginning. She just looked like she was about to drop. She looked so distraught. She looked so upset.

So I asked her if she would mind if I helped these other folks, and I’ll save your question to the end because I could just see that tears were welling up and it wasn’t going to be good if she was the first person in the line. I finished up with the other people and I sat with her.

She said, “My son is on drugs. I don’t know what drugs. I found this paraphernalia. He broke the door. He hit his sister.”

She is giving me this story of what it is like to be the mom of an addict. So I told her that sounds all pretty rough, very scary.

I asked her, “Where do you think your son gets money for drugs?” She was very silent. Do you know? Does he have a job? How do you think he gets money for drugs?

She said, “Well I guess I give it go him.”

“Oh, okay, that is good to know.” I said, “Do you think you could stop giving him money for drugs? In other words, don’t give him any money, because he buys drugs with the money.”

“No, I couldn’t do that.” “Why couldn’t you?” “Well, sometimes he probably doesn’t buy drugs with the money. He might buy coffee or a sandwich or go to the cinema.

So I said, “He might, yes, he might. But you know he buys drugs with the money you give him. “Yes, yes, he does.”

“So again, do you think you could stop giving your money for drugs?”

“No, I don’t think I could do that.”

At that point, there wasn’t a lot more I could say. Sometimes we have to stop helping the person buy drugs and alcohol before we can even begin to help them stop using drugs and alcohol.

This mom was not even willing to take that first step of not giving her child money.

I was so stunned that she was not willing to take that first step. This was going to be a process. The process might go on for years or for decades.

What you do is you stop giving money and you try and make sure your money doesn’t get stolen and you start with little steps. It might have been a chink in her denial, a break in her armor, a little opening where some light might shine in.

Click here to read part two where Chris talks about marijuana, how much parents should reveal about their own drug or alcohol past, and the prevalent drugs that he is seeing in the schools.

What do you think about drug prevention in schools? How can it make a difference for your child? Share your thoughts in the comments.

CHRIS KELLY has conducted prevention education classes, workshops, and assemblies since 1995. He has worked at hundreds of schools in 9 different countries and has personally educated over 50,000 students. He experimented with drugs as a teen out of a deadly combination of ignorance and curiosity. He quickly became addicted. Despite loving parents and their attempts at intervention, he stayed addicted for 15 years. Entering recovery in 1990 he found his passion for prevention education and has never lost the joy of helping young people and their families

We don’t tell your kids WHAT to think. We ask them to PLEASE THINK before they make their decisions about tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs.

You can find out more about Chris at Prevention PLUS,  and follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.