It is rare when your children fully realize when you make a major sacrifice for them and pull them out of harm’s way when that course of events is the way of the world. Everybody was doing one thing and we whipped him out and were named strange by his teachers and many of his friends’ parents. Some of them would no longer permit their children to play with him since we left the herd and all.
In this case, my son actually knows what happened and what his dad and I did for him for many reasons but one is that he had friends in college (he just graduated!) who were put on the drugs and now suffer greatly as drug addicts who have lost themselves.
He thanks us often and he actually listens to us. It is difficult for parents to know when to conform and when to become “strange.”
I have a former neighbor that put her daughter on medication when her daughter was in school in the 80's/90's. She regrets it now. Her daughter has really struggled with drug abuse problems.