Youth and alcohol

As an educator who has always lived in the town where I work, I’ve often struggled with being associated with any sort of alcohol consumption and the perception it might give to my students.
As a rule, I won’t buy a six-pack at Safeway if I know that checker or order a glass of wine if my server is a student. I’m just unsure of the message it may send.  Now that my own kids are older, I’m becoming increasingly aware of alcohol in the house and thinking about how to talk to them about it.
One thing that I’ve realized is that, as a parent, I have to talk to my kids. I have to educate them because there is no stronger role model or more effective teacher. Nobody knows our kids better than we do.
Starting from a young age, our children are saturated by alcohol ads and use in the media. They observe droves of tourists in our thriving wine-based economy. They even hear from some adults, “it’s OK – we did it… just make sure you don’t drive.” What they observe is that alcohol use is not only OK, but it’s great.
While having a beer, the occasional cocktail, or enjoying a great bottle of wine is fine or even great for adults, there is much research that shows that it isn’t good, in any way, for teens.
Beyond drinking and driving, teens are not developmentally equipped to handle impaired judgment and are vastly more prone to developing a dependency or addiction issue that will last a lifetime. The fact that teens and alcohol are a bad mix is undeniable.
At Healdsburg High School, we’ve spent the last two months bringing this message to our community. In March, we brought in Ralph Cantor, a drug educator from Berkeley to speak about teen brain development and marijuana. A few weeks later, we all watched in horror as our students re-enacted a fatal drunk driving crash as part of our Every Fifteen Minutes program.
On Tuesday, April 28 at 6:30 p.m., we will host a parent forum in our cafeteria to talk about teens and alcohol. This forum will cover the dangers and issues associated with teenage alcohol use and will give parents tools to start this important, and sometimes difficult, conversation with their kids.
Please plan on joining us for this informative evening. As parents, we have to educate our children about drugs and alcohol. If we put it off or choose not to talk with our kids, we can only be sure they will receive a very different message from somewhere else.
Chris Vanden Heuvel is the principal at Healdsburg High School.