Get In The Way With Love

The teen brain focuses on risk and excitement. Our job as parents, grandparents, and caring adults is to Get in the Way or foil a teen’s attempt to be involved in high-risk behaviors such as underage drinking, teen marijuana use, and prescription drug misuse. Here is a call to action with some effective Get in the Way examples.

Say Something

1. Talk early and talk often.

2. Clearly Communicate Expectations: Be clear to your children that you disapprove of underage drinking and drug use. Both are NOT acceptable.

3. Reinforce Expectations. This is part of talking often. DO connect privileges and freedoms to being responsible. While it may be okay to loosen the reins a bit as your child gets older, it needs to be clear that drinking and drug use remain unacceptable.

4. Set consequences for unacceptable behavior. (see #2 below)

Do Something

1. Encourage your children to participate in sports, clubs, or volunteer activities.

2. You MUST follow through on consequences for unacceptable behavior.

3. Limit access (lock) alcohol and LOCK your prescription drugs using an Rx lock box.

4. Be a parent. Monitoring and supervision in high school can reduce drinking in high school and college. Students whose parents allowed them to drink late in high school are more likely to have problems with alcohol in college.

5. Make each moment count. Teens only get one junior/senior year. Let them know you don’t want them to miss out on things because of bad choices like drinking and drug use.

6. Intervene if needed. You don’t need hard evidence to begin. Your intuition telling you something is wrong is enough to take action. Find more steps to intervene on the https:// www.3PCoalition.org/resources page on our website.

Using the behaviors above will set a solid nouse message. Kids and their friends will think twice before using and disappointing you. Most importantly, they will know you mean business, take you seriously, and thank you in the future.

Submitted by Larry Tracey, founder of Youth4Youth, WOW Coalition Program Director. For additional information, visit www. Youth4Youth.org or http://www.wowcoalition.org