What to Tell Your Kids about Drugs & Alcohol Before They Leave Home
It could be Spring Break, it could be the big departure for college or a trip to Europe or the other coast. Whatever it is, it’s the first time your teenaged or young adult child has left home on their own. What should you tell them?
Of course, any parent will have conversations about basic safety and security while traveling or staying in unfamiliar locations. The next subject on the list should be a thorough conversation about drugs and alcohol.
Certainly, many parents have these conversations with their children. This is an area where it’s hard to be too thorough. But it is easy to treat the subject too lightly. To get you interested in doing a thorough job, here’s a few stories and statistics.
Spring Break
Research shows that the average male at a Spring Break venue drinks 18 drinks a day; the average female drinks 10. Every year at Spring Break events, some people just get sick, some are rushed to the emergency room and some don’t survive.
- In 2010, Matt James, a 17-year-old Notre Dame football recruit on Spring Break in Panama City fell off a fifth-floor balcony and died. Reports said he was “drunk and belligerent.”
- In 2012, 19-year-old college freshman, Molly Ammon died of alcohol poisoning in Florida after her friends put her to bed to “sleep it off.”
- In 2013, an 18-year-old college student, Giselle Ayala fell from a cliff in Isla Vista, California. She was intoxicated and had used marijuana before her death.
- One father took the precaution of traveling with his son and friends to Panama City two years before the boy went to his first solo Spring Break at 19. His son still drank heavily and then fell from a hotel balcony and died.
In Miami, an emergency room doctor warned parents about the dangers of Ecstasy use during Spring Break. Along with alcohol and marijuana, this is one of the most popular drugs during these events.
College
More than 1,800 college students die each year from alcohol-related injuries. Alcohol-related deaths are preventable deaths. At colleges over a 12 year period, the abuse of painkillers such as Vicodin or OxyContin increased 343 percent and misuse of stimulants like Adderall increased 93 percent.
Oklahoma is not a destination for Spring Break, however Oklahoma young people may fall victim to these dangers. In 2014, a 19-year-old college student from OSU was killed in Alabama as she walked along the highway with her sorority sisters. The driver who killed Kasey Waychoff had been drinking.
And of course, Oklahoma is home to several universities and colleges. The students at these institutions may be away from home for the first time. After 19-year-old freshman Blake Hammontree died at a fraternity at the University of Oklahoma, the school’s authorities made the decision to eliminate all alcohol on campus.
The best time to start having drug prevention conversations with your child is before they are offered these drugs or see their friends using them. That means you need to start having these talks when they are 10 years old at the latest. That may seem very early but once they have heard how fun the usual gateway drugs are—alcohol, marijuana and for some, pills—they may turn a deaf ear to what you have to say.
You must tell the truth about each drug and not exaggerate the dangers. If your children see people using drugs and having fun instead of overdosing and getting sick or dying, they may disbelieve the other education you have given them.
To help you talk about these different drugs, here’s some information from the Narconon Arrowhead website.
Alcohol: http://www.narcononarrowhead.org/drug-abuse/alcohol/
Marijuana: http://www.narcononarrowhead.org/drug-abuse/marijuana/what-you-can-do.html
Ecstasy: http://www.narcononarrowhead.org/addiction/ecstasy/ecstasy-facts.html
Here at Narconon Arrowhead, we specialize in bringing people back to sobriety after they lose control of their drug or alcohol consumption. If you or a loved one needs help restoring the brightness and hope of life after addiction, we can help. Call 1-800-468-6933.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2014/03/11/spring-breaks-greatest-danger/#cf3e1e46dfb3
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2014/03/11/spring-breaks-greatest-danger/#cf3e1e46dfb3
