Help Your Child Avoid Underage Drinking With These 10 Tips

Help your child avoid underage drinking – it can be one of the best things you do in your overall effort to help them avoid long-term problems with drinking. Why? Because of brain development that occurs from birth through one’s early 20s. That brain development makes a child’s brain especially vulnerable to the effects of…

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Brain Development and Underage Drinking

Brain Development and Underage Drinking – understanding the connection is critical to helping teens make healthy decisions about drinking – for their brains’ sake. For anyone working to reduce underage drinking, one of the keys to helping coalitions, parents, and young people better understand the “reasons” is to share the new science — the science-based…

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Race to Nowhere – Pressures on Today’s Teens

The pressures on today’s teens are extraordinary. I remember when preparing for the S.A.T. test was, “Do you have an extra #2 pencil – I forgot mine?” Today, children are pressured to take AP classes, volunteer, play a varsity sport, excel in all classes, strive for a 4.+ GPA – watching my own daughters go…

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How Can Parents Help Teens Decide Not to Drink?

How can parents help teens decide not to drink? And should they – shouldn’t they be “teaching” their teens to drink? These are common questions among parents (and teens, for that matter). There’s an underlying perception that “all teens drink” or “I [parent] drank and am fine, so what’s the big deal?” Reasons to Help…

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Everybody Drinks

Everybody drinks – time and again, you hear students and adults say something like, “It’s normal. All kids drink.” And, often, researchers (myself included) focus on how many young people are drinking. The 2002 to 2006 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health, for example, found that in 2006 almost one in five people aged…

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Teen Brain Development and Alcohol

Teen brain development and alcohol – believe it or not – alcohol does not work the same way in the teen brain as it does in the brain of an adult. Why? A picture is worth a thousand words, and I thought the following images may help readers better understand the impact of alcohol (or…

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