Reply to HS Party with Alcohol... Death

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
[quote]Teens will find and drink alcohol.

So we should facilitate that?

Different poster here.  This is the point.   Yes, kids will find something to drink.  But there's a difference when they know it's wrong and not sanctioned by adults.  They drink less.  When the parents act like it's all OK or even worse, supply the stuff, there's no reason for them to moderate their drinking at all.  
[/quote]

Do you really think that teens moderate their drinking when it's not sanctioned by adults? [/quote]

I think teens engage in fewer risky behaviors when the opportunities to engage in them are reduced.  The drinking that happened at the Saltzman house would not have happened if Kenneth Saltzman had not sanctioned it.  The teens who drank, drove, and were killed or injured might have gone elsewhere to drink, or they might have shrugged and stayed at the Salzman house to watch a movie and have a pizza.  We don't know.

The point is, yes, kids will get into risky stuff.  But we don't have to, nor should we facilitate that.  We have more power than we think, and parenting strategies can and should be used to reduce drinking among teens.

See e.g.:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20815663

and

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127222042

[i]"The Role Of Parents

So if parents want to give a "no alcohol" message to their teens, what can they do? Alcohol researcher Caitlin Abar from Pennsylvania State University found that parents' efforts do play a role in shaping their teens' behavior. She studied how parents deal with their high school teenagers regarding alcohol use while still at home, and she then checked after the teens' first semester of college. Her study of 300 teenagers and their parents was published recently in the journal Addictive Behaviors.

"Parents who disapproved completely of underage alcohol use tended to have students who engaged in less drinking, less binge drinking, once in college," Abar says.

And conversely, a parent's permissiveness about teenage drinking is a significant risk factor for later binge drinking.

"The parents who are more accepting of teen drinking in high school were more likely to have children who engaged in risky drinking behaviors in college, compared to those children who had parents that were less accepting," Abar says. The researchers also asked the teens about their parents' drinking patterns and found that parents' own drinking behavior influenced a teen's later alcohol use.

Rules Matter

But, it was parents' rules that had the strongest effect, says Abar. Complete disapproval of teen drinking by parents was the most protective, even more than when parents allowed a limited amount of alcohol consumption.

Other studies support Abar's findings. Psychology professor Mark Wood from the University of Rhode Island says that parental monitoring — knowing where your teenagers are, who they're with, what they're doing — also pays off in terms of less drinking when they go off to college.

"The protective effects that parents exert in high school continue to be influential into college," Wood says. "Even after a time when the kids have left the home. So it's the internalization of those values, attitudes and expectations that seem to continue to exert an effect.""[/i][/quote]

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