What Every Parent Needs To Know About Teen Substance Use

I direct the largest addiction research center in the country, and I study substance use in adolescence. Here’s what every parent needs to know about adolescent substance use:

1. Adolescence is the time when most kids initiate substance use, establish regular patterns of use, and many start to experience consequences. About 15% of the population will meet criteria for a substance use disorder at some point in their lives, meaning that substance use is causing significant harmful consequences. The average age of onset for problems is in the early 20s, so most problems start in adolescence. That’s why we focus so much substance use prevention programming on teens.

2. Adolescents have brains that are wired for risk-taking. This is a result of the fact that the brain doesn’t develop evenly. The part of the brain that is highly attuned to experiencing reward is fully developed in adolescence. That’s a product of evolution — if our brains didn’t respond positively to food, social interactions, sex, as a species we wouldn’t survive very long. Those things make us feel good, and we seek out more of them. But as we all know, too much of a good thing can lead to trouble. The part of our brain that helps us weigh the consequences of our actions and think about long-term implications isn’t fully developed until the mid-20s. So…