Young and Drunk

As I rushed into the building where my girls' preschool class was, I caught the front page headlines of our local newspaper: "Young and Drunk: Edmonton police reveal 1/3 of young people between 15 and 29 binge drink." The tragic part was, I wasn't shocked at all. In fact, my first thought was, "What took them so long to realize that?"

I was a kid within those statistics. In fact, I started drinking when I was twelve. In my case it wasn't a matter of getting into the wrong crowd or giving into peer pressure. My mother was an alcoholic and made it easy for me to sneak alcohol. There were even times when she asked me to drink with her! I was, what psychologists call today, "a high-risk kid."

High-risk kids are those whose homelife or even the area they live in catapults them into the category of most likely to fall into a life of drugs, alcohol or more life-threatening activities. My question for the Edmonton police is: What do you suggest we do about that 15-29 year old group and bring down that alarming statistic? I have a few suggestions:

(1) Teach: We know teenagers will rebel in some ways. We also know that in order to believe what we teach them, kids have to figure things out for themselves sometimes. And we have to let them even if it's a hard lesson. But we should never give up teaching. By teaching I don't mean lecture. I mean giving information, facts, real-life stories these kids can relate to. If you lecture, they'll tune you out. If you teach at their level they're more likely to absorb your words.

(2) Listen: My grandfather used to say, "Listening is closing your mouth and opening your ears." That means hear what these kids are telling us. It's so difficult to be a teenager and even more difficult to be an individual who doesn't give in to peer pressure. Listen to what kids tell you. Encourage them to talk to you. Despite the stereotype kids, tweens and teens aren't "brain dead." All they want is to be heard, respected and treated as the intelligent young people they are. It's no different than adults.

(3) Encourage: Peers have a powerful gravitational pull on one another. Encourage young people to use that power to make a positive difference. Get them to promote that being sober is a better, healthier way to be! Teach them the strength it takes to say, "No!" and to be their own person. Think of the difference it would make if we could make if kids felt good about not giving in to peer pressure.

(4) Example: Plain and simple...we can't teach what's right and wrong if we aren't living by our own example. My mother, for example, never lectured us for drinking or using drugs. How could she? She showed us that drinking is what you do when you have problems. And I can't count how many times she drank and drove. Kids won't listen if your words are hypocritical. The expression, "Do as I say, not as I do" isn't the way to show our kids what's right.

(5) Be (or find) a voice of experience: Here in Edmonton, we had a woman named Barb Tarbox who died of lung cancer due to years of smoking. While she was going through painful radiation and chemo, she went around to various junior and high schools to lecture on the evils of smoking. She lost her hair, her skin pale, her body rail thin and still-even a few days close to hear death-spewed to teens everywhere: "Don't start! And if you do it, STOP!" She described how her lungs felt, how she struggled for air some days, what chemo and radiation where like...and her shoot-from the hip approach brought countless kids to tears as they gave Tarbox their cigarettes and thanked her for her bravery. That's how you reach kids: experience. It's even more affective if that voice is a peer.

I'm not perfect; I gave into peer pressure. And I got myself into many scary situations because of my addictions. But I refused to die and be another statistic of a "poor kid of an alcoholic who couldn't help but get into the same lifestyle."

Thank you, Edmonton police, for bringing these statistics to our attention. Thank you for showing people what a lot of us already knew-that there's a terrible epidemic of young people falling into this lifestyle made fun and exciting by others already doing it. Now, please...teach people how to stop it.