Read This Before Your Child Goes To College

Through my employer, I subscribe to various newsletters that periodically appear in my personal email inbox. The service is called LifeWorks, and they send newsletters on topics that you are interested in, like better parenting tips, stress relief, etc.

I received one today that discussed college age drinking, and it quoted some startling statistics. Among them:

1. 1,700 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 die each year from alcohol-related unintentional injuries, including motor vehicle crashes.
   
   
2. More than 696,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 are assaulted by another student who has been drinking.
   
   
3. More than 97,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 are victims of alcohol-related sexual assault or date rape.
   
   
4. 31 percent of college students met criteria for a diagnosis of alcohol abuse and 6 percent for a diagnosis of alcohol dependence in the past 12 months, according to questionnaire-based self-reports about their drinking.
   
   
5. 25 percent of college students report academic consequences of their drinking, including missing class, falling behind, doing poorly on exams or papers, and receiving lower grades overall.

While I realized that drinking in college was prevalent, and perhaps even seen as a key social event(s) in college, I did not really understand how alcohol abuse can affect not only the person drinking, but can greatly affect those around him/her. This is, I feel, one of the saddest truths about abusive drinking: that it is generally not victimless. Its not just the drinker who gets herself into trouble. It's the people that happen to be around them as well. This is what makes abusive drinking so tragic.

The newsletter identified a .gov website with some pretty good information for parents and kids in high school and in college. It gives advice on how to handle the many drinking parties a typical college student will be enticed to attend, and it talks about how the first six weeks of a student's school life is critical to how the rest of the year is going to go.

If you have a high school student or college student in your home, this website would be worth the look: College Drinking Prevention.