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Keeping Your Teen Out of Trouble This Summer

The transition from school to summertime provides new opportunities for teens — and it can be challenging for some adolescents to cope with the change. Studies show that teens who haven’t tried drugs or alcohol are more likely to start during times of transition in order to deal with stress. But don’t worry — while change is a part of life, risky behavior, like drug and alcohol use, doesn’t have to be.

You can’t control the changes that impact your teen, but you can pay attention to his or her feelings, concerns and needs. Conversations are one of the most powerful tools parents can use to connect with — and protect — their children. Here are seven ways parents can help deter their teen from engaging in risky behaviors during the free time they’ll have this summer:

1. Work Up a List of What They Can Do Without Asking Permission

It can be frustrating for teens when they’re not being able to reach a parent at work in order to ask permission to go to a friend’s house, the movies or the beach. It can be equally frustrating for the parent whose employer frowns on personal phone, text or email interruptions. To address this conflict, sit down with your teen to talk about the kinds of activities they may do without your explicit permission. The condition is they leave a note or send you a text that tells you where/what they are doing, with whom, the time of departure and their estimated time of return.

2. Install Computer Controls

With some 200 million websites worldwide, Facebook, YouTube, and any number of other internet enticements, telling your teen that you are adding controls and a history tracker to your computer can help. This allows you to check (and them to know you are checking) where they are and have been online.

3. Know What’s in the Cabinet

It’s important to track the alcohol you have in the house - whether that’s in the fridge, liquor cabinet, garage, hall cupboard or wine cellar. Not necessarily because you are concerned your teen will consume alcohol (or collect quantities from various liquor bottles to fill their 12 ounce water bottle) but to help him or her avoid peer pressure to do so. The same is true of the medicine cabinet, your purse or the bathroom drawer. Also, with one in five teenagers abusing pain medication, it’s important for parents to monitor and secure all prescription bottles and pill packets in the house. As well as dispose of all expired medications to decrease the opportunity for your teen or their friends to abuse your medications.

4. Establish That Periodically Throughout the Day You Must “TALK”

Not text, but talk. A parent can tell when there is a change in their child’s voice, which likely will not come through in a text, and that voice change can be a signal that something is amiss.

5. Take the Spare Car Keys to Work (or track the mileage)

Just like the computer controls, knowing that you are tracking the mileage (or taking the spare keys to work) removes the temptation to “borrow” the family car.

6. Know Who Your Teen’s Summer Friends Are

Friendships can change once school is out. Some friends may go off to camp or at a summer job, while new kids are suddenly available to hang out. Knowing who your teen’s current friends are will give you the opportunity to talk to those friends’ parents in order to coordinate oversight while you’re both at work.

7. Follow-up on Statements That Don’t Ring True

“It’s not mine. I’m just keeping it for a friend.” Never believe these kinds of statements outright. Talk to that friend’s parents. A friend that asks your teen to hold drugs or alcohol for them is not a friend to have because obviously that teen knows it’s wrong, or they would hold it at their own house. Trust your instincts — chances are if you suspect your child is using drugs then she probably is or something else is going on.

Some of these suggestions may feel like you’re sending the message that you don’t trust your teen. But, in actuality, by reducing the opportunities for your teens to lie or go along with the crowd during adolescence, we strengthen trust all around.

What do you plan on doing to keep your teen out of trouble this summer?

Do you know what % of addictions start in the teen years?

If your answer is 90%, unfortunately you're right. That 's a disturbing statistic when you take into consideration that today over 11 million young people have problems with drinking and drugs, and only 15% of them are getting the help they need.

If you think that someone you care about is addicted to drugs or alcohol, recognizing the problem is the first step in getting help.

Many people think they can kick the problem on their own, but that rarely works. Unfortunately, overcoming an addition is not easy. Quitting drugs or drinking is probably going to be one of the hardest things. Most people who try to kick a drug or alcohol problem need professional assistance or a treatment program to do so.

Visit SAMHSA's website to find a treatment location near you: http://dasis3.samhsa.gov/

Less Than One-Third of High School Students Perceive a Great Risk in Drinking Daily

This study highlights the perceptions of high school students as it relates to alcohol consumption. Some shocking statistics show us that over 60% do not see any risk associated with drinking one or two drinks nearly every day. Have you talked to your teen about alcohol? Tell us about it in the comments section.

High school students are less likely to report a great risk in drinking nearly every day than in the regular use of illicit drugs, according to data from the 2010 Partnership Attitude Tracking Study. Less than one-third (27%) of high school students report that they think there is a great risk in drinking one or two drinks nearly every day and only 55% see a great risk in drinking four or more drinks nearly every day. One-half of students perceive a great risk in using marijuana reguarly. The perceived risk of regular use of other illicit drugs is much higher, ranging from 72% to 84%. The survey also found that only 31% of students disapprove of teens their age getting drunk. Previous research on high school students has shown that teens' decreased perceptions of risk and disapproval of alcohol and drug use are related to increases in use.

New Study Finds: Teen Drinking Not "Just a Phase"

Problem drinking during the late teenage years is a real problem, not just a phase, and can signal problem drinking in young adulthood, according to a new study CNN Health reported recently.
The findings are published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

Lead study author Richard R. Rose of Indiana University stated, "The key finding was that the more drinking-related problems experienced by an adolescent at age 18, the greater the likelihood that adolescent would be diagnosed with alcoholism seven years later, at age 25." He went on to explain, "The analysis of co-twins ruled out factors such as parental drinking and household atmosphere as the source of the association, because twins jointly experience these." Rose said that because twin teens in the study had the same parental, environmental and genetic factors, the results provide strong evidence that drinking behavior at age 18 is a strong predictor for drinking behavior at age 25.


The study involved 597 twins enrolled in long-term Finnish study of twins. At age 18 the twins took the Rutgers Alcohol Problem Index (RAPI), which is a self-administered questionnaire designed to measure alcohol drinking related problems. Rose said the RAPI is one of the most widely used assessments of problematic teen drinking. Study participants were later interviewed in-person at age 25 to assess alcohol dependence.


The study found that 52% of teens had RAPI scores reflecting problematic drinking at age 18, and those results held at age 25 when the young adults were tested for alcohol dependence. 46.2 % met the criteria for alcohol dependence and 1.5% for alcohol abuse. RAPI scores in late teen years "robustly predict alcohol diagnoses in early adulthood. Accordingly, our results also provide new evidence that one pathway to problem drinking in early adulthood is a direct one from problem drinking in adolescence," according to the study. Rose says the findings show that teen drinking problems can chart a course to problems with alcohol in young adulthood.

Research Supports Current Legal Drinking Age of 21

As some of you may know, over the past two years about 100 college presidents and administrators in the U.S. have been supporting the Amethyst Initiative, which advocates lowering the legal drinking age to 18 years. The argument is that if the legal drinking age is lowered, young adults, specifically those on college campuses, won't be so tempted to binge drink. Well, a recent study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs recently found that lowering the drinking age did NOT lower the amount of binge drinking on college campuses. Hooray for research! Keep reading for the full story from CADCA:

A group of researchers have successfully debunked the myth that lowering the drinking age would reduce underage drinking, at least amongst college students.

Prompted by speculation by the two-year-old Amethyst Initiative— a group of more than 100 college presidents and other high-ranking administrators who want to reduce the Minimum Legal Drinking Age from 21 to 18, claiming that reducing the legal drinking age could result in less alcohol use on college campuses—researchers at BioMedware Corporation in Ann Arbor, Mich. extended the model previously developed by Dr. Richard Scribner of the Louisiana State University School of Public Health to conclude that lowering the drinking age would not cause students to drink less.

The study, “Heavy Episodic Drinking on College Campuses: Does Changing the Legal Drinking Age Make a Difference?” published this month in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, used data available from 32 U.S. campuses nationwide. Researchers took a cross-section geographically, some were primarily commuter campuses, some students lived in dorms and some campuses and even the surrounding communities were “dry,” researcher Robert G. Rommel says.

Lead author, Jawail Rasul, Ph.D., says, “Our goal was to reduce binge or “heavy episodic drinking” among college students.”

Since 2006, the group of epidemiologists and mathematicians has been working on modeling student drinking in terms of drinking types (abstainers, social, “heavy episodic” and problem) and reasons students transition between these types—processes of individual risk, social interactions and social norms. The group had built up a model where campuses are characterized by alcohol availability, which they call “wetness.”

The team, including Dr. Scribner, who returned for the new analysis, organized the underage students from the legal-age students on campus and assigned them different “wetnesses” (higher for legal age). They also altered the social interactions between social and “heavy episodic drinkers” for underage drinkers to model the misperception effect emphasized by the Amethyst Initiative. They then measured the effects of policy change by focusing on total “heavy episodic drinkers.”

Researchers discovered that the wetness increase on the campuses for the expanded legal age drinkers always outweighed the effects of misperceptions.

“The imbalance became even worse for drier campuses with strong enforcement of underage restrictions, where the Amethyst initiative says the misperceptions are the strongest,” Dr. Rasul says.

Authors say other alcohol-related problems such as impaired driving, tend to increase as access increases, as well.

Rasul concluded, “Since there was no evidence that high misperceptions of peer drinking are the norm, it was highly unlikely that lowering the drinking age would reduce student “heavy episodic” or binge drinking.”

Parenting Style Can Influence Teen Drinking

CADCA reported this week that teens may be more likely to drink alcohol if their parents are extremely strict OR extremely laid-back. Keep reading for the full story:

Researchers at Brigham Young University have found that teenagers who grow up with parents who are either too strict or too permissive tend to binge drink more than their peers. The study was published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

"While parents didn't have much of an effect on whether their teens tried alcohol, they can have a significant impact on the more dangerous type of drinking," study author Stephen Bahr, a professor of sociology at BYU, told National Public Radio.

As part of the survey of 5,000 teens, researchers asked 7th- to 12th-grade students a series of questions about their alcohol such as how frequently they binge drink, how often they communicated, in general, with their parents, and what kind of parenting style did they think their parents possessed.

The teens being raised by “indulgent” parents who tend to give their children praise and warmth, but who don’t monitor bad behavior were among the biggest alcohol abusers.

"They were about three times more likely to participate in heavy drinking," Bahr said.

This was also true for teens whose parents were strict.

"Kids in that environment tend not to internalize the values and understand why they shouldn't drink," Bahr said. They were more than twice as likely to binge drink.

The parenting style that led to the lowest levels of problem drinking struck a balance between both styles: accountability and support.