You want to have fun this summer, but you probably also want to stay safe. Nothing ruins a great summer day faster than a trip to the emergency room. The summer is actually the most dangerous time of the year for most Americans, however. Drug and alcohol use skyrocket during the warm summer months as people hit the beach, go to concerts and stay out later at bars and parties. The alcohol and drugs start to flow and accidents start happening.
In order to keep yourself from becoming a victim of these summer statistics, there are specific steps you can take to stop summer drug use and keep yourself safe.
Keeping Kids Safe
Now that school is out for the summer, your kids are probably finding that they have a lot of free time on their hands. It may be more free time than you’d like or are comfortable with, but what are you going to do? It’s not like you can afford to have kids babysat all day every day throughout the summer. Besides, older children and teens will resent the fact that you want someone to watch them and may rebel against it.
In order to keep your kids safe this summer, you do need to combat what is one of the primary reasons for teen drug experimentation in the first place: boredom. When young people have huge amounts of free time available during the summer, they usually start by binge watching TV and movies and playing hours of video games. When those pastimes start to lose their appeal, many teens will call up friends to go out and find ways to entertain themselves.
Sadly, for many teens this means breaking into unprotected liquor cabinets or trying out that bottle of pills found in a parent’s dresser drawer. Teenagers in today’s world are very open to persuasion from their friends and the media, and a lot of TV shows and movies have made getting high seem like a lot of fun. As a result, your teenage children could be trying to find ways to get high while you’re not around.
In order to keep them safe, make sure you lock up or remove any drugs or alcohol from your home if you won’t be there with your kids. By keeping these substances far from searching hands, you can take a first effective step to make sure your kids won’t be engaging in dangerous experimentation.
Drug & Alcohol Free Starts with Setting a Great Example
Even if you take steps to keep dangerous drugs and alcohol away from your kids, they can still get a bad example from an unlikely source – you. Most parents have no idea how much they influence their children. They may think that kids aren’t watching or listening to what the adults are up to, but they usually are. When you have that barbecue will all your adult friends present, you need to watch what you do and what kind of effect it could have on kids.
If all the grown-ups are getting drunk, for example, that is telling your youngsters that this is okay to do. You may not have verbally said it, but you’ve shown it with your actions (or lack thereof.) If anyone is passing around a joint at your party, it doesn’t matter that you may have asked your kids never to use drugs. They see that some of your friends are doing so, and you have thus given tacit approval in their eyes. By keeping drugs and alcohol away from you and your friends, you’re teaching your kids more than you imagine.
For more on this topic check out our press release.