The Partnership for a Drug-free America
October 2009 – Decoder - Breaking down teen culture, substance abuse, and parenting

10 Ways to Trick Your Teen into a Healthy, Drug-Free Lifestyle

Oct 30, 2009 by Joe Keenan | Categories Advice, Communicating, Prevention, Teenagers, Tweens

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Experts say it’s normal for teens to trick their parents from time to time. In honor of Halloween, we’ve created a guide for parents to do some trickery of their own — all in the name of reducing teen mischief and keeping kids safe, healthy and drug-free.

Check out these 10 tips for tricking and treating your teen on Halloween and beyond.

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Your Parenting Style May Affect Your Teen’s Driving

Oct 20, 2009 by Joe Keenan | Categories Connecting, Monitoring, Prevention, Setting Limits, Teenagers

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Parents have a big impact on the safety of teen drivers, according to an article in Healthday which highlights two recent studies published in the journal Pediatrics last month.

Parents who set rules and boundaries, and follow up on these rules, seem to raise teens who are better drivers. The first study observed the connection between parenting styles and teen driving behaviors/attitudes, and the second looked at teen behavior based on access to a vehicle.

More than 5,000 teens in grades 9-11 were surveyed and their responses show that teens with authoritative (high support along with rules and monitoring) or authoritarian (low support with rules and monitoring) parents are half as likely to speed. They also wear seatbelts twice as often as teens with uninvolved parents (low support and low rules.)

Compared to teens with uninvolved parents, teens with authoritative parents (More…)

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New Resources for Military Families to Keep Kids Healthy and Drug-Free

Oct 12, 2009 by Joe Keenan | Categories Advice, Communicating, Health, Stress, Teenagers

The Partnership recently joined with two other organizations — the National Military Family Association and the National Association of School Nurses — to announce new resources to help military families keep their kids healthy and drug-free.

Science shows that transitions are particularly stressful periods for kids and they are more likely to experiment with drugs and alcohol at those times. Kids in military families face more significant transitions than kids in most other families –- from moves and new schools about every three years to having a parent deployed, injured or even killed. We wanted to create resources specifically for military moms and dads so that they were aware of the risks that these kinds of transitions can pose and so that they’d have a simple set of tools to use to help them talk to their kids at these vulnerable intervals.

At our launch event on Capitol Hill September 30, a mom told the story of her son’s drug use and subsequent addiction which started when (More…)

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