Moms take aim at teen drinking Campaign created to educate parents

Maine parents should smarten up about their kids’ drinking behaviors.

With a recent survey confirming that teenagers consume significantly more alcohol a lot more often than their parents suspect, three high-profile Maine moms teamed up on Tuesday to drive that message home.

Appearing together in the Welcome Center of the State House, first lady Karen Baldacci, Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Brenda Harvey, and Office of Substance Abuse Director Kim Johnson announced the rollout of a new media campaign aimed at raising parents’ awareness of their teens’ behaviors. All three state officials are raising teenagers.

Most parents do not want their youngsters to drink, Johnson said.

“They want to do the right thing, but often they don’t know what the right thing is,” she said.

The new “Find Out More, Do More” campaign will offer parents solid information and suggestions for keeping their teens away from situations where underage drinking is a threat.

The campaign features a series of television advertisements that will run from now until shortly before the November elections, when airtime becomes prohibitively expensive, Johnson said. The ads will resume after elections are over.

The ads, and a state Web site that backs them up, offer parents a number of resources for addressing the issue of underage drinking, including five specific tips for helping their kids steer clear of alcohol.

The five tips are: Limit teens’ access to alcohol; network with your kids’ friends and their parents; reinforce and enforce your family rules; check in with your kids often while they’re out with friends; and be up when they come home at night, ready to confront them if they’ve been drinking.

Each tip offers good-better-best options that start with basic measures at home and move up to community-wide strategies and hard-line enforcement of family rules. For example, “good” steps to limit access to alcohol include not keeping it in the home, storing it where youngsters can’t get at it and monitoring how much should be in each bottle.

“Better” measures include actively communicating appreciation to store clerks who “card” young buyers, and a “best” action is alerting police about where underage drinkers are getting their alcohol in your community.

Under “check in often” – a “good” intervention – is to ask teens headed for a party whether adults will be there and whether alcohol will be present. A “better” step is to require teens to phone home from the party, using caller I.D. to determine whether they’re actually where they say they are. And “best” – check in with other parents about the party, or drop in unexpectedly to see for yourself what’s going on.

Commissioner Harvey said talking to teens and asking questions isn’t enough. “We need to change our behaviors so our teens will change,” she said.

Baldacci noted that many adults don’t realize alcohol affects young people differently, interfering with brain development, memory formation and sensitivity to biochemical functions. “By delaying drinking until age 21, the odds that a teen will develop a serious alcohol-related problem drops from 40 percent to about 10 percent.”

Absent from Tuesday’s event was Cali Nickerson, a Maine mother whose teenage son recently was killed in a drinking-related accident. In a written statement, Nickerson cautioned Maine parents to take action. “Be aware, it’s not just somebody else’s kid,” she said. “Act early, they start younger than you think. My son was a good kid, and I’m a good parent. But had I known more, I could have done more.”

According to the results of the 2006 Maine Youth Drug and Alcohol Use Survey, 31 percent of Maine ninth-graders reported using alcohol in the 30 days before the survey was taken. But according to a recent phone survey of Maine households with teens, only two percent of parents suspected that behavior. By 11th grade, nearly half of all students reported drinking in the past month, with only 11 percent of parents thinking their high-school juniors drank.

The same report revealed that nearly a third of high school seniors reported binge drinking in the past two weeks, while a mere 1 percent of their parents were aware of it. Binge drinking is defined as five or more drinks in one sitting.

While the use of illegal drugs and the abuse of prescription medications are growing problems in Maine, alcohol remains the most frequently abused drug in all age groups. For more information on combating underage drinking, visit www.maineparents.net.