Alcohol education failed me and my peers
Hey! Hey! Hey! Keep your head in the toilet, there you go buddy!” is what many of my friends said on the night of a school dance. One of my friend’s dates had a run in with Pink Whitney (a pink lemonade vodka) and decided to chug a bottle of the 30% ABV beverage.
He drank himself unconscious, was profusely vomiting, and woke up in the emergency room the next morning. Fortunately, he lived to tell the tale and can now joke about it. While it’s easy to say he was being stupid and should have known not to chug vodka, did anyone ever tell him what a safe amount to drink is?
No one told us
I don’t think it was the DARE officer who came into our fifth grade classrooms, but it was too long ago to remember. It wasn’t our middle school and high school health teachers. They told us never to drink at all.
The public school in Pittsburgh we went to failed us by not giving us the tools or information we needed to practice safe drinking.
A study found that in the state of Pennsylvania, 73,000 young people reported drinking alcohol in the past 30 days. Many binge drink. In fact, teenage binge drinking is understood to be a public health crisis.
Binge drinking is defined as drinking four standard drinks for women and five standard drinks for men in the course of two hours. When thinking about what a “drink” is, it’s important to remember that one standard alcoholic beverage is 12 fl oz of beer (about 5% alcohol), 8-10 fl oz of flavored malt beverages like hard seltzer (about 7% alcohol), and 1.5 fl oz shot of distilled spirits (about 40% alcohol).
One study found that college aged binge drinkers are seven times more likely to drive while under the influence, participate in unsafe sex practices, and inflict injury on others or themselves than college aged people who don’t drink.
Speak to your children, and listen
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism created guidelines about how to handle or mitigate teenage drinking habits. One of the most important things is having a strong parentchild relationship that helps create open communication between parents and child relationships so they can openly and easily talk about alcohol.
This is a way you can help lower rates of teenage binge drinking from home. The NIAAA article emphasizes the importance of making it a conversation, not a lecture. If you want your teen to have safer drinking habits, you have to hear their thoughts about it as well as express important facts and not myths about alcohol use.
It’s better to have conversations before you get the call from a hospital saying that your daughter got too drunk, or seeing her body laying there while you wait and see if she’s going to wake up. If this is not something that you are comfortable with, petition your local schools for better alcohol education.
One of the ways to combat teenage binge drinking is to implement educational programs. It all starts with learning about the risks of alcohol, learning how to drink responsibly or at least learning the signs of when you are too drunk.
That starts with the school system. Advocate for better alcohol education at your local schools. We can take the lessons we learned with Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) and improve upon them to make a better alcohol education program.
DARE warned against the danger of drinking and drugs, but it was not effective because the person teaching the program was a total stranger, and the program wasn’t interactive enough.
We need to implement alcohol education that focuses on interactive activities. One example could be using drunk goggles to show how alcohol can impair your perception and coordination and tie this into a lesson on not to drive drunk. These lessons should be taught by a trusted adult such as a health teacher, or a homeroom teacher.
Don’t fail your children
Just because alcohol education failed my friends and me doesn’t mean it should fail the next generation of teenagers.
If you want your teenagers to have safer drinking habits, it starts with open conversations and stronger alcohol education. Binge drinking in teens is a public health crisis, but it is also an extremely preventable one.