Young adults can also benefit from the support of friends and family. Although people who still have early alcoholism can learn skills to prevent addiction. Kids as young as 12 have reported drinking alcohol. It is good to have open and honest communication with children and teens about alcohol.
While this may not be an easy conversation, building a strong parent-child relationship can make a difference. Talk with them about alcohol and what it does to their body.
Share statistics and facts that highlight the risks of drinking alcohol at a young age. Set rules about alcohol and inform teens that drinking and excessive alcohol use has consequences.
Educating children on the negative effects of alcohol before they become an adult is essential. Doing so may help reduce their risk of substance abuse. In many cases, underage drinking starts at home. If you keep alcohol at home, monitor the supply, especially if you leave your teen and their friends unsupervised.
Get to know their friends and their friends' parents and how they view alcohol and substance use. Many teens and young adults turn to alcohol as a way to reduce stress. Teaching them healthy coping skills can help them better handle stressful situations without the need for alcohol. Taking an estimated 88, lives each year, alcohol addiction is the third leading cause of preventable death in America.
In addition, alcohol misuse places an estimated billion-dollar burden on the economy. As an adult, you are responsible for your actions. So if you want to prevent alcohol addiction, you should start with yourself.
Whether you drink casually or have started to drink alcohol more frequently, you can take the following steps to sober up. Don't set a drinking limit on your own. Instead, follow the guidelines set out by health care institutions and medical professionals. According to the NIAAA, only 2 out of people who drink within these limits go on to develop alcohol problems.
What specific causes trigger you to drink? Do you crave a drink after a stressful day at work? Do you turn to alcohol when you are bored or lonely? Have you previously experienced trauma? Are you currently going through a stressful situation? All of these are good questions to ask yourself. Approximately one-half of the States in the United States allow alcohol delivery from retail establishments to private residences.
The only published study of teen use of home delivery found that 10 percent of the 12 th graders and 7 percent of the to year-olds reported consuming home-delivered alcohol Fletcher et al. A limitation of this study is that it did not ask whether it was the underage youth or an adult who had ordered the delivery of alcohol. Recently, State and national policymakers have proposed restrictions on home delivery of alcohol ordered from Internet sites. Although debates over these controversial proposals involve apparent concern for reducing youth access to alcohol, home delivery from local retail outlets is a more likely source of alcohol than Internet orders, at least in part because it provides more immediate access to alcohol.
Internet sales require youth to plan weeks in advance to purchase alcohol for a drinking event, require a credit card, involve careful planning when and where the alcohol will be delivered, and potentially require storage until the drinking event occurs. Restrictions on retail home deliveries of alcohol, however, are not included in the policy debates on Internet sales; therefore, it appears that policy attention to alcohol Internet sales may have more to do with the varying economic interests of local versus national alcohol distributors and retailers.
The effects of restrictions on Internet or retail home deliveries on youth alcohol use have not been studied. Policies to Reduce Social Access.
Policy tools for limiting youth access to alcohol from social providers attempt to reduce the frequencies of underage drinking parties and of adults illegally providing alcohol to youth. Some of these prevention approaches are being implemented at the community level.
For example, communities may address underage drinking parties by creating enforcement mechanisms, such as noisy assembly ordinances, that allow law enforcement officers to enter private residences where underage drinking is occurring.
Communities can also require beer kegs to be registered at the time of retail sale. Using a keg's unique identification number and the registration information, police officers can identify and penalize adult purchasers of kegs used at parties where underage guests are caught drinking.
To deter adults from illegally giving alcohol to youth, some States have enacted social host laws that allow third parties to sue social providers when provision of alcohol to youth results in a death or injury.
Although many possible policy strategies have been identified that may help reduce social access to alcohol, little research has been done to evaluate the specific effects of these strategies. Policies to Reduce Economic Availability.
Policies also can help reduce the economic availability of alcohol. A large number of econometric studies have clearly demonstrated an inverse relationship between price and consumption of alcohol-that is, higher prices result in reduced consumption. For more information on the effects of price on alcohol consumption, see the article in this issue by Chaloupka and colleagues, pp.
Policy simulation studies suggest that this relationship exists among the general population as well as among adolescents. Thus, higher alcohol prices may substantially reduce both the frequency and the amount of teen drinking, even among youth who are already heavy alcohol consumers Laixuthai and Chaloupka In fact, price increases may be particularly effective in reducing youth drinking, because heavy drinkers in young populations are more affected by price than are heavy drinkers in the general population Godfrey ; Chaloupka and Wechsler One policy that has been used to raise the price of alcohol is to increase the excise tax on alcohol.
Although alcohol excise taxes are often raised for revenue-generating reasons, several studies suggest that higher excise taxes may affect youth consumption and its consequences. Higher taxes on alcohol are associated with less drinking among to year olds Grossman et al.
Higher taxes are also associated with fewer traffic fatalities among youth Saffer and Grossman , higher graduation rates from college Cook and Moore , and less violence among college students. Community participation is critical for creating comprehensive changes in institutional policies e. Several community trials have included community-organizing components to mobilize and successfully change policies addressing public health issues Wagenaar et al.
Only one community trial-Communities Mobilizing for Change on Alcohol CMCA -has focused solely on policy changes to reduce youth access to commercial and social sources of alcohol. CMCA tested a community-organizing intervention in a trial involving 15 communities that were randomly assigned to receive the intervention or to serve as control communities.
The goal of the community-organizing intervention was to reduce the accessibility of alcoholic beverages to youth under age Through the organizing effort, diverse groups of people across the intervention communities developed and implemented strategic action plans to influence a wide array of institutional policies Wagenaar et al. The intervention was successful in several respects. For example, it changed alcohol merchant practices around selling to underage youth and reduced the propensity of to year olds to buy alcohol in a bar, provide alcohol to other teens, or consume alcohol Wagenaar et al.
Furthermore, following the intervention, arrests for driving under the influence among to year olds were significantly lower in the intervention communities than in the control communities Wagenaar et al.
Two other community trials-the Community Trials Project CTP and the Saving Lives Program-have also addressed underage drinking, although the focus of these studies expanded beyond the underage population. The goal of the CTP was to reduce injury and deaths related to alcohol use among all age groups Holder et al. The intervention included the following components:.
Involvement of the media to increase awareness. Training of alcohol-retail establishments, including information on preventing sales to underage patrons. Compliance checks conducted by law enforcement to reduce illegal alcohol sales to underage patrons.
Increased enforcement of drunk-driving laws. Reduction of alcohol availability through regulation of alcohol outlets. Following the intervention, sales rates to buyers who appeared to be under age 21 were lower in the three intervention communities than in the three comparison communities Grube The intervention communities also showed reductions in self-reported drinking-and-driving rates, nighttime injury crashes, alcohol-related crashes, and assault injuries among the general population Holder et al.
The Saving Lives program, which was conducted in six communities in Massachusetts, also involved community mobilization to address drinking and driving among all age groups Hingson et al. The intervention included multiple strategies that addressed alcohol-impaired driving as well as other traffic problems, such as speeding, other moving violations, and seat belt use. Following the intervention, the relative decrease in alcohol-involved fatal traffic crashes was 42 percent in the intervention communities compared with the rest of the State the absolute change was from 69 crashes to 36 crashes in the intervention communities.
Furthermore, self-reported drinking-and-driving among to year-olds was reduced by 40 percent in the intervention communities compared with the rest of Massachusetts. Although various individual strategies have been successful in preventing youth alcohol use, a more comprehensive approach combining several of the intervention strategies described above might be even more effective.
Two studies-the Midwestern Prevention Project and Project Northland-have combined school, family, and community strategies to prevent alcohol use among adolescents; their results are described in the following sections. Midwestern Prevention Project. The Midwestern Prevention Project, which was not specific to alcohol use but addressed all types of drug use, consisted of the following four components:.
A session school program emphasizing drug-use-resistance skills training, delivered in grade 6 or 7; this component also included homework sessions involving active interviews and role plays with parents and family members. A parent organizations program for reviewing school prevention policy and training parents in positive parent- child communication skills.
Initial training of community leaders in the organization of a drug abuse prevention task force. Mass media coverage of the program. The study was composed of eight representative Kansas City communities that were randomly assigned either to the full program including all four components or to a control program including only the community organization and mass media components.
After 3 years, students in the communities implementing the full program had lower rates of tobacco and marijuana use, but not alcohol use; this follows the previously described findings that alcohol use patterns appear to be the most difficult to change.
Project Northland. Project Northland was designed to prevent or reduce alcohol use among young adolescents using a comprehensive, multicomponent intervention that targeted both the supply of and demand for alcohol.
Project Northland was evaluated using 20 school districts from northeastern Minnesota that were randomly assigned either to the treatment or control condition.
The students participating in the study were surveyed from grades 6 through The intervention was conducted in three stages: a first intervention phase, an interim phase, and a second intervention phase.
The first intervention phase, which was conducted when the students were in grades six through eight, included: 1 social behavioral curricula, 2 peer leadership and extracurricular social opportunities, 3 parental involvement and education, and 4 community-wide task forces Perry et al.
At the end of 3 years, a smaller percentage of students in the intervention communities reported drinking or beginning to drink compared with students in the control communities. Furthermore, among students in all districts who at the beginning of sixth grade reported never having consumed alcohol, those in the intervention communities were not only less likely to drink 3 years later but also had lower rates of cigarette and marijuana use Perry et al.
The interim phase of the study occurred when the students were in grades 9 and During those years, only minimal intervention i. In fact, by the end of grade 10, no significant differences existed between the two groups Williams and Perry In the second intervention phase, when the students were in grades 11 and 12, they were exposed to various interventions, including an 11 th grade classroom curriculum, parent postcards, mass media involvement, youth development activities, and community organizing Perry et al.
As a result of the intensified intervention, the alcohol use patterns of the treatment and control groups began to diverge again by the end of the 11 th grade, and the differences between groups were marginally significant for those students who had not used alcohol at the beginning of 6 th grade Williams et al.
An analysis comparing the trajectories of alcohol use between the treatment and control groups i. During the first intervention phase, the increase in alcohol use was significantly greater in the control group than in the intervention group. Conversely, the increase in alcohol use was significantly greater in the intervention group than in the control group during the interim phase, when there were minimal program efforts. Thus, the students in the intervention group seemed to return to the level of drinking that was normative in their communities.
Fortunately, that trend was reversed again during the second intervention phase. Adolescent alcohol use is one of the most difficult behaviors to change because alcohol use is so ingrained in the U. Adolescents choose to consume alcohol, not just because of personal characteristics, such as personality type or level of social skills, but also because it is a part of daily life in their communities and, for many youth, in their homes Wagenaar and Perry As Wagenaar and Perry indicate in their theoretical model , numerous social and environmental influences affect adolescents, including messages they receive from advertisements, community practices, adults, and friends about alcohol.
Comprehensive interventions targeting underage drinking may need to counter or change all of these messages to motivate individual adolescents to choose not to consume alcohol. Effectiveness of policies maintaining or restricting days of alcohol sales on excessive alcohol consumption and related harms pdf icon external icon [PDFKB]. Am J Prev Med ;39 6 — Effectiveness of policies restricting hours of alcohol sales in preventing excessive alcohol consumption and related harms pdf icon external icon [PDFKB].
Am J Prev Med ;51 5 — Enhanced enforcement of laws prohibiting sale of alcohol to minors: systematic review of effectiveness for reducing sales and underage drinking. Transportation Research E-Circular. Effects of alcohol retail privatization on excessive alcohol consumption and related harms: a Community Guide systematic review pdf icon external icon [PDFKB].
Department of Health and Human Services and U. Additionally, having the support of those who care about you can also help you maintain your goals. Overall, it is up to you to make the changes you feel should be made in your own life. Surrounding yourself with people who support those changes will help you stay focused on the life you want.
Thankfully we offer alcohol treatment in Massachusetts that can help people get back on the right path. At Vertava Health Massachusetts, formerly Swift River, we offer rehabilitation for those who are seeking to make changes and move forward into recovery. Get started on your journey today. Get Help Now How To Prevent Alcohol Abuse.
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