Is Sending Your Kid Away to College Dangerous?

                                                                                         

Sending our kids away to college used to be a milestone – a big accomplishment. The kids would get a better general education and a good grounding as experts in their chosen field. They would leave home as teens, and come home as adults, ready and able to take on the world. But things have changed. While some kids might still do all those things, many get caught up in a whirlwind of college drugs and alcohol, and even risk prescription drug addiction so they will be able to focus on exams after months of living a life that would appall their parents.

Today, sending your kid to college is risky. Any tendency they had to drink or take drugs before college may well escalate once they’re ensconced in a world where a night of entertainment can end in detox center or the emergency room of the local hospital. Where girls are raped, guys get into brawls and have accidents, and both take addictive ‘study drugs’ like Concerta, Ritalin and Adderall to try to focus and stay awake long enough to cram a semester’s worth of study into the two weeks prior to exams.

A recent article in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine reported on the results of a study of 3,639 students about their use and abuse of prescription opioids, stimulants, sleeping aids (sedatives) and anxiety medications. About one in five said they’d used these drugs without a prescription.

Another study reported last year in U.S.A. Today found that college kids have higher rates of alcohol or drug addiction than the general public: an alarming 22.9% of college kids actually met the definition for “alcohol or drug abuse or dependence” – i.e. compulsive use of a substance despite negative consequences.

The amount of binge drinking – defined as having five drinks in one sitting for guys, or four for girls – is also surprising. Nearly 40% of students had a binge drinking session once in the past two weeks, and about 20% came in at three or more times.

And from there, it gets even worse - 83% of campus arrests involve alcohol.

So, what can you do about it? One thing’s for sure, you’d better start doing it long before it’s time for the kids to leave for college. From the time the kids are in about Grade 5, you’ve got to start watching out for drugs and alcohol, participating in their lives, spending more time with them, encouraging them, getting to know them, making sure they understand they’re important to you. Get to know their friends, follow up on anything that seems unusual – any change in attitude, appetite, friends, performance in school, anything. Even taking up smoking cigarettes is a warning sign.

You also have to start educating them early. First, you have to get educated yourself. Find out about the real scene with drugs and alcohol in schools, what the drugs are, what slang names the kids use, what the drugs do, and what they can do. Same with alcohol. And then start educating your kids. Kids whose parents educate them on the dangers of drugs and alcohol are 50% less likely to get involved with them.

And if they do have a drug or alcohol problem, get them into a good drug addiction treatment center before they go off to college.

If parents do this, there’s a good change they can turn going off to college back into the exciting and enriching experience it once was. If they don’t, they’ll spend most of their time worrying about their kids. And rightly so.

About the author:


Gloria MacTaggart is a freelance writer that contributes articles on health.

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