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April is Alcohol Awareness Month, which is one of the reasons why we chose April 21^st as PowerTalk 21 day, the national day for parents and teens to talk about alcohol.

Of all the dangers teens face, underage drinking is among the worst. Compared with non-drinking classmates, teens who drink are more likely to:

Die in a car crash
Get pregnant
Flunk school
Be sexually assaulted
Become an alcoholic later in life
Take their own life through suicide

The longer a teen waits to start drinking, the safer he or she will stay. Both parents and teens can be part of the solution.

Parents play an important role in a teen’s decision to drink. In fact, 74% of teens say their parents are the number one influence on their decision to drink.

MADD knows that informed, caring parents can make a difference, and we’re here to help. Download the latest version of the Power of Parents handbook for tips and tools to help you start the potentially lifesaving conversation about alcohol with your teens. And, we are giving away an iPad to one lucky parent who downloads the handbook during April. You can also find additional tips and expert resources at madd.org/powerofparents.

We also have a Power of You(th) booklet available. This research-based booklet for teens helps you take a stand against underage drinking, for both yourself and your friends.

Together, we can prevent underage drinking and help teens meet their full potential.

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New Data Shows Continued Decrease in Underage Drinking
By MADD | December 20, 2012 | Filed in: Power of Parents , Underage Drinking

Data recently released by Monitoring the Future, one of the leading surveys on teen drug use, shows good news in the fight against underage drinking. For the first time since the survey began in 1991, fewer than 30% of 8th graders had drunk underage. Since we launched the Power of Parents® program in 2010, drinking among 8th graders has declined by 19% and drinking among 10th graders has declined by seven percent.

The news is not all good, however. Drinking among 12th graders went up in the 2012 survey. More than half of all high school seniors (54%) have been drunk and over half of those have been drunk in the past month. In addition, almost one out of every four 12th graders reported binge drinking in the past two weeks.

This shows the need to have not just one talk with your children about alcohol, but rather to have an ongoing conversation. As your child grows, they will know more, have different questions and face more difficult pressures. MADD has research based tools available that can help get these lifesaving conversations started. Use our Power of Parents handbook to talk with you teens about not drinking alcohol until they are 21 and never getting in the car with someone who has been drinking, or visit the parent section of our website to get more tips and expert resources for talking with your kids about alcohol.

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Study Shows Effects of Teen Alcohol Use
By MADD | December 19, 2012 | Filed in: Power of Parents , Underage Drinking

A study recently published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research shows that teens who drink underage show signs of breakdown in the brain's wiring system.

The brain has two broad types of tissue, known as gray matter and white matter. The gray matter can be seen as the brain's information-processing centers, while the white matter is like the wiring connecting those centers. Using brain scans of 92 teenagers, researchers found that kids who regularly drank showed negative changes in the brain's white matter over 18 months. The impacts of those changes in white matter can prevent parts of the brain from talking to each other as effectively, hurting memory, attention, and mental processing speed.

With regular, repeated, heavy use throughout adolescence and young adulthood, these effects may become more noticeable and consequential. You can read more about the study here.

Fortunately, parents can have a strong influence on whether your teens drink — nearly three out of four kids say their parents are the leading influence on their decisions about drinking. We encourage parents take advantage of the holiday break, to talk with their teens about alcohol. Having intentional and ongoing conversations with your teen about alcohol can be lifesaving, but we also know it can be difficult. That’s why we created Power of Parents®— a research based program that has been shown to reduce underage drinking when you read the parent handbook and talk with your teen about drinking. You can download the parent handbook here.

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Moms Influence Teens' Friends
By MADD | October 15, 2012 | Filed in: Power of Parents , Underage Drinking

We all know that teens’ parents and friends can have a big influence on their decisions about drinking, but did you know that their friends’ parents can also have a big impact?

A report recently published in the online edition of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine suggests that mothers who are authoritative (that is, they balance nurturing and responsiveness with setting and holding their kids accountable for high expectations) with their teen children also influence the behavior of their teens' friends.

The study found that if an adolescent had a friend with an authoritative mother, that adolescent was 40% less likely to drink to the point of drunkenness and 38% less likely to binge drink than an adolescent who had a friend with a neglectful mother.

The indirect positive effects of authoritative parenting in reducing behaviors associated with underage drinking emphasizes our need to provide the Power of Parents® handbook and workshops to as many parents as possible. The Power of Parents program provides important tools for parents to help prevent underage drinking in not only their own teens, but also their teens’ friends through authoritative (also known as positive) style parenting.

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Important Item for your Back to School Checklist
By MADD | August 22, 2012 | Filed in: Power of Parents , Underage Drinking

It’s the time of year that every school-age kid dreads—the end of summer, which means… back to school. While finishing up last-minute summer projects and gathering the necessary supplies for the school year is likely keeping your family busy enough, MADD would like to suggest one more item to add to your back to school checklist: talking with your kids about alcohol.

The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASAColumbia™) recently released their 17th annual “back-to-school survey” to track attitudes of teens and those, like parents, who influence them. They surveyed 1,003 kids ages 12 to 17 with questions about school, family, social networking, their friends’ and classmates’ substance use, and their access to tobacco, alcohol, and illegal and prescription drugs.

As we expected, the results of this survey support the need for MADD’s Power of Parents™program. The program, sponsored by Nationwide Insurance, relies on research showing that parents have the power to influence their teen’s decisions about alcohol by setting expectations with your teens about alcohol use. Some key findings of the CASAColumbia survey include:

Parental expectations, particularly expressing strong disapproval of teen substance use, can be a decisive factor in a teen’s decision to drink alcohol.
Teens who say their parents would not be extremely upset if they found out they drank alcohol are almost four times more likely to have drunk alcohol (58% vs. 15%).
Teens who say their parents would not be extremely upset if their parents found out that they drink are ten times more likely to say it’s OK for teens their age to get drunk than teens who say their parents would be extremely upset (22% v. 2%).

We hope that this information will give all parents and caregivers the push they need to talk with their kids about alcohol to help keep them safe, as they head back to school. MADD has tools available that can help with this difficult discussion. Use our Power of Parents handbook to talk with you teens about not drinking alcohol until they are 21 and never getting in the car with someone who has been drinking, or visit the parent section of our website to get more tips and expert resources for talking with your kids about alcohol.