Is Your Child Immune? Underage Drinking Doesn’t Discriminate

What you can do about it to protect your teen.

Photo by Sean Bernstein on Unsplash

Many of us experiment with alcohol during our teen years, myself included.

For most, it’s a rite of passage and nothing more. We go on with our lives, and alcohol doesn’t become a problem.

But for others, teen drinking can turn into an alcohol problem.

Physicians in emergency rooms see kids with blood alcohol levels four to five times the legal limit for driving. “At that level, 50% of people die,” says Dr. Mary Claire O’Brien, an emergency medicine physician and assistant professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina. She points out that those levels were only seen in chronic alcoholics ten years ago.

Some kids who want to get drunk fast to ease their social anxiety are finding increasingly more dangerous ways to do this.

Here are some examples of underage drinking:

• Mixing alcohol with super-caffeinated energy drinks
• Flavored malt drinks in 23.5-ounce cans, each containing a serious dose of alcohol
• A shift in preference from beer to hard liquor