Parents, Lock Up the Liquor Cabinet

As a parent it can be difficult sometimes to draw lines with your kids about certain responsibilities, especially once they hit the teenage years. For example leaving your kids at home by themselves is a common struggle for parents to decide on because even though parents might be able to trust their own kids, they can’t always say the same for their friends. One of the first places that young teenagers will go once their parents leave the house is to the forbidden liquor cabinet– and this becomes even more likely with the presence and pressure of having friends over while parents are gone. But this whole scenario could be eliminated with a little extra effort—something as easy as locking up the liquor cabinet.

Parents are giving their children alcoholic beverages at a much higher rate than most people realize. Some 709,000 youngsters aged 12 to 14 in the United States are drinking beer, liquor and other alcoholic beverages, a new federal study found. Drinking as a youth is a gateway to potentially lifelong alcoholism. Though locking up your liquor cabinet might seem like an extreme notion for some, the reality is that it eliminates the possibility of your kids drinking at your house without your supervision. This is especially important for young teenagers because drinking at a younger age further increases the risk of future alcoholism problems. Parents need to understand that their kids will have their time and place to learn how to responsibly drink when they are the appropriate age—underage drinking is not the kind of thing that you want to be known as ‘the cool parents’ for. Allowing drinking at your house, or the lack of responsibility to even realize it, is damaging to the kids that are potentially developing alcoholism issues and it puts the parents at risk for charges and lawsuits. More importantly of the latter, the last thing you want as a parent is to be responsible for the exposure to a future addiction/dependence, like alcoholism. Though it’s not ideal, the fact of the matter is that underage alcoholism is a problem in our society today that we need to deal with.

Much of the treatment available today does not address the specific needs of adolescents. For example, most young people prefer easy access to treatment, with strategies tailored to their age group, and treatments that do not remove them from their home or academic settings. Youth perceive traditional services like alcoholism treatment programs and Alcoholics Anonymous as less helpful than brief interventions tailored to their concerns. Boston, Massachusetts (MA) parents who want their kids to be committed to a successful rehabilitation plan need to explore the programs at Seabrook. Seabrook employs highly credentialed professionals in the addiction field, whose specialties encompass every area of medical, clinical, psychological and spiritual treatment of the disease of addiction. Located in rural Bridgeton, New Jersey (NJ)—roughly a 6 hour drive or about an hour flight from Boston, Massachusetts (MA)—Seabrook is an internationally recognized private and exclusive inpatient drug rehab and alcoholism detoxification treatment center who has achieved an elite CARF accreditation status. Get the treatment that will put your kids on the road to recovery with Seabrook.