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Alcohol Awareness Month: Don’ be those parents

The Columbian
Published: April 23, 2015, 5:00pm

Experts are using April, Alcohol Awareness Month, to spread a simple, direct message: Don’t be those parents.

Those parents host drinking teenagers at their homes, reasoning that it’s a safer alternative to letting teens roam free on the weekends. (We can monitor their intake and activities. They won’t be drinking and driving. We seem like open, approachable parents.)

“Bad idea,” Barbara Greenberg, clinical psychologist and co-author of “Teenage as a Second Language: A Parent’s Guide to Becoming Bilingual” (Adams Media), told me.

Alcohol Awareness Month is devoted this year to highlighting the consequences of underage drinking, prompting Greenberg to pen an open letter to parents for Psychology Today.

“I have heard of too many teens dying because of alcohol overdoses and alcohol-related traffic accidents and I wish these tragedies could be averted,” she wrote. “I am asking for your help.”

I called Greenberg to talk about “bringing the party home,” her term for allowing teenagers to drink under your watchful eye.

“First of all, it’s not legal,” she said. “So it models deceit. It gives the impression that we’re above the law. The law is you can’t drink, but we’ll bypass that law.”

And where does that lead?

“If laws are optional, that carries over to other areas,” she said. ” ‘Can I go above the speed limit? Can I text and drive? Yeah, I think I can.’ That’s what happens when you introduce doubt into the law.”

The practice also drives a wedge between other parents and their children.

“Most parents who bring the party home are not calling the other parents to tell them what they’re doing,” Greenberg said. “It’s polarizing. You’re giving the message, ‘We’re the cool parents. Yours are not.’ “

Which is a message with a host of negative consequences, she argues.

“I see this with my patients all the time. ‘I’d rather have so-and-so as parents. They’re cool,’ ” she says. “They’re not cool. They’re permissive. Research shows the best parents are not permissive and they’re not authoritarian, ‘You’ll do this because I said so.’

“The best parents are authoritative. They set rules with love. They give limits and explain why.”

You could mention, for example, that drinking before your brain has fully developed dramatically increases your risk for addiction, according to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.

Or that alcohol use by teens is associated with traffic fatalities, violence, suicide, educational failure, overdose and unsafe sex, according to the same group. Or that alcohol is more likely to kill young people than all illegal drugs combined. (Same group.)

But they’re teenagers, Greenberg always hears. They’re going to drink.

“You can make it difficult for your kids to go to places where you think they’re going to drink,” she answers. “You can set consequences if they drink, and you can stick with them. Hold your kids responsible for their safety and the safety of their friends.”

And spelling out your clear boundaries for your kids can make a big difference in whether and how much they drink, Greenberg said.

“If you go on the record as being opposed to underage drinking, that’s going to affect your kids’ sense of right and wrong,” she said. “That stays with them. You want them to internalize what you believe.

“More than anything, believe it or not, kids don’t want to disappoint their parents,” she continued. “They don’t care that much if you get angry. But they don’t want to disappoint you.”

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