“Mom, we’re just going to Burger King, we’ll be home in a while…”

It happens every summer as soon as school lets out. Sometimes a few weeks before school lets out. Easter break, Christmas break, Spring break. Any break from school and it seems like the cool thing to do is throw a party. Not just a “have a few friends over party”, but a full blown juvenile drinking party.

We get calls on the weekends for numerous drinking parties at residences, usually on Friday and Saturday nights. There are certain common characteristics we see in all of these parties and after 15 years of responding to these calls I have yet to see these not be the case.

The first being Mom and Dad had no idea what was taking place at their home. They were out of town on vacation or on business and decided to leave their older children home alone. What I’m reminded of here is the saying “when the cat’s away the mice will play.”
(Here’s a scary thought. On a few of these calls, Mom and Dad were home but didn’t think anything was wrong with their kids having a party for their friends…that is until one of their friends kills themselves while driving home.)

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What can you do about teen drinking parties? P L E N T Y !

Communication with your kids is the biggest first step. There’s a commercial on television that depicts a father and a son sitting down to eat a bowl of cereal across from each other at the kitchen counter. Not a word is spoken between the two as the father opens the paper, and the kid starts eating his cereal. The theme of the commercial is “another missed opportunity to talk to your kid about marijuana.

You have to take this a step further. Talk to them about everything! EVERYTHING! You have to be the guiding light in their life. You’re the coach, they are the players. They have to know what you expect, what won’t be tolerated, and what the rewards will be later on. They have to have a respect to want to make you proud and to not let you down….The downside if you’re a bad coach, is that your players aren’t gonna care whether they win or lose, or what you think, and that is reflected in the majority of the kids we deal with.

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