As children grow older, one thing they can count on is being asked to take tests. It's just part of growing up.

Teachers want to know if students are learning. The state wants to know that roads aren't filled with drivers who lack the knowledge and skills to operate a vehicle safely on public roads. Parents want to know if their kids are doing drugs, and they are turning to home drug testing kits to find out.

We've all grown up with report cards and drivers licenses as proof of our ability to pass these tests. However, with a new way to privately test kids at home for drug use, more and more parents want to see proof.

Home drug testing kits give parents instant results with lab-quality accuracy and give kids a socially acceptable excuse to resist peer pressure. The words "No thanks, my parents test me" stop pushy peers in their tracks.

Critics often claim that home drug testing is a violation of trust. If we could just take a child at his or her word, why would we ever need to conduct a math test or a driver's test or ever look at a report card?

If anything, I contend that it is more important for parents to look at the results of home drug tests than those of a spelling test, for example, since kids aren't likely to lose their limbs, lives, or freedom (by going to jail) simply because they misspelled a few words.

As long as expectations have been communicated and rewards as well as consequences have been spelled out in advance of test results, kids should feel no differently about parents looking at their drug test results than they do about showing their report card or driver's license.

Good students are proud to show off their good grades, and kids who don't do drugs should be proud to show their parents that they aren't intimidated by peer pressure and can make healthy choices in spite of it.

Good schoolteachers embrace the responsibility of showing up for work each day focused on how to help their students learn. They teach and test. They don't seek to be friends or buddies with their students and are more interested in their students' learning than they are in their students' opinions about how "cool" they are.

Good parents are good teachers too. They just have fewer students and those students just happen to be their children.

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