A Different Kind of Conversation About Underage Drinking
Talking to you teen about underage drinking may require a different kind of conversation starter.
Broaching the topic of underage drinking with your teen — now that’s a conversation stopper!
It’s that time of year — graduating high school seniors off to college in the fall, 19 year old college students home for the summer, and parents concerned about how to talk to them about drinking at this stage of the game.
4 Underage Drinking Conversation Starters
One approach is share information with your teens from the perspective of your teen keeping themselves safe when around friends who are drinking. Here are four informational underage drinking conversation starters:
1. Did you know alcohol is not processed like other foods and liquids, which is why a person acts the way they do when drunk? Alcohol enters the bloodstream through the walls of the small intestine. Because alcohol dissolves in water, the bloodstream carries it throughout the body (which is 60-70% water) where it is absorbed into body tissue high in water content, such as the brain. The liver metabolizes alcohol – meaning that’s how it leaves the body – we can’t vomit, sweat or urinate it out. That’s because alcohol is not digested like other foods or liquids. It takes the liver about one hour (often up to two) to metabolize the alcohol in one standard drink. Four drinks will take four hours. There are many variables that influence how quickly alcohol is metabolized, including weight, gender, stress, medications, and stage of brain development. Notice that last one — stage of brain development. The teen brain goes through some key developmental processes, especially through one’s early 20s. Because the teen brain is not fully developed, young drinkers are more vulnerable than adults to many of the effects of alcohol in some areas of the brain — areas that control and modulate emotion, memory, learning, motivation and judgment, for example, AND less vulnerable in other areas — areas that control drowsiness or lack of coordination. The latter is partly what gives the perception that a young drinker can “handle” their drinking.
Because the brain is mostly water and highly vascularized (meaning lots of blood vessels) and it controls everything we think, feel, say and do, the excess alcohol (waiting its turn out the liver) stays in the bloodstream and suppresses certain brain functions, such as the ability to “think” straight and act normally. This is why a person can find him/herself engaging in the drinking behaviors listed in #3.
2. Did you know alcohol works differently in the teen brain than it does in the adult brain? Check out this link, the science in a nutshell, at The Partnership at DrugFree.org for all kinds of information as to what this means for underage drinking.
3. Did you know there’s actually a “number of drinks” definition for binge drinking, which is often how people get into trouble – too much alcohol sitting in the brain suppresses brain function. Binge drinking is defined as having 4 or more standard drinks on an occasion for women and 5 or more for men. Binge drinking can cause a person to engage in drinking behaviors – even if the drinking pattern occurs only once, like those listed below:
- Fighting with friends or family about the drinking; saying or doing things you don’t remember or regret.
- Experiencing blackouts – fragmentary or complete; vomiting; passing out.
- Driving while under the influence; riding in a car with someone who is.
- Having unplanned or unprotected sex.
- Being admitted to the emergency room with a high BAC
- Doing poorly at work or school because of recovering from the drinking.
And by the way: “normal” or “low-risk” drinking limits are defined as: no more than 3 standard drinks on any one day or 7 in a week for women and no more than 4 standard drinks on any day or 14 in a week for men.
4. Did you know there’s such a thing as a “standard drink?” Often people get into trouble with drinking because they aren’t aware of concepts, such as a standard drink, which is defined as 5 ounces of table wine, 12 ounces of regular beer, 8-9 ounces of malt liquor (think ale or lager beers), or 1.5 ounces of “hard liquor,” such as 80-proof vodka, gin, bourbon or scotch.
Not only are people unaware of the sizes of a standard drink of various alcoholic beverages, but they are also not fully aware of how many standard drinks are in common cocktails or drink containers. This confusion is what makes it so easy for a person to engage in binge drinking (defined in #3 above), which in turn changes brain function (and therefore behaviors) because of the way alcohol is processed by the body (see #1).
Using NIAAA’s Rethinking Drinking Website to Start Conversations on Underage Drinking
Another approach for this conversation on underage drinking is to visit NIAAA’s website, Rethinking Drinking, together. They have some great calculator tools for conversations, such as: “If your friends are drinking, one way to keep yourself safe and to do what you can to keep them safe is to understand how many drinks are in a glass or container. For example, did you know a tall beer contains 2 drinks? Using this drink size calculator, let’s see how many standard drinks are in a red cup of wine.”
BOTTOM LINE, sharing this kind of information with your teen empowers them. If a teen fully understands the concepts of a standard drink and a ‘standard drinks count’ for binge drinking, as examples, they can be prepared to:
- count their friend’s drinks and better understand why their friend is behaving the way they are (because of alcohol’s impact on the brain while waiting to be metabolized by the liver)
- know not to take to heart anything their friend says while under the influence (because alcohol’s impact on the brain changes a person’s behaviors)
- know never to accept a ride, even if their friend has only had “a couple.”
The most important thing is to keep talking!
For additional conversation starters, check out my new eBook, Crossing The Line From Alcohol Use to Abuse to Dependence – just $3.99. [Link to free apps to read Kindle on Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad…]
Lisa Frederiksen
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Some great advice here Lisa! I never appreciated how differently alcohol works in a teen brain compared to an adult, so this is good to know. And you’re so right to highlight the importance of talking to our children about keeping themselves safe when they’re drinking. They’re not likely to be seeking out this sort of advice because having fun and being part of the crowd can be more important than thinking about alcohol intake. But if we raise these issues as part of everyday conversations we could be making such a difference!
Thank you so much for your input, Carolyn!! I like to think of it as similar to comprehensive sex education vs abstinence only sex education. With the former, you know the entire picture and can make informed decisions for yourself. With the latter, the biggest piece is missing (like how a pregnancy can even happen, which is how some teens find themselves doing “everything but” and getting pregnant even though they’ve ‘abstained’). Information — especially when shared in a respectful, fact-finding conversation with a parent — does not make a teen drink, and most importantly, it can help them make the decision not to drink and/or to stay safe when around those who are and/or better understand how and what can happen, giving them the reasons to stop or cut back. Thanks, again!
Hi Lisa,
Good information for parents and their teens. The point you made about how parents should keep talking to your teen cannot be emphasized enough. Communication is one the of keys to having your child make healthy choices and not fall prey to peer pressure during their teen years.
Thank you, Cathy — one just never knows what or when will be the spark or the topic that will stick — as you said, the more frequently we do it (in a variety of ways), the better the odds.
[…] often parents go into the discussions with their kids in a more penalizing kind of way. The goal is that at all costs, they have to stop drinking and […]