Ask a room full of high school students how many of their classmates drank last month, and many will guess about half. The real number for seniors is closer to 20 percent.
That gap came up in “The Buzz Is Changing,” a recent Operation Parent webinar with Prime For Life President, Dr. Aaron Weiner. It’s a small statistic with a big implication. Teens aren’t only shaped by what happens around them. They’re shaped by what they believe is happening. When someone thinks everyone drinks, drinking starts to feel like the cost of belonging – whether that’s drinking alcohol or trendy caffeinated beverages.
Marketing feeds that belief. Alcohol and energy drink brands aim squarely at young people, with candy-sweet flavors and captions that treat consuming their products as a personality. Meanwhile, teenage brains are still developing the ability to spot a sales pitch, which is part of why it works.
There’s a lot of information out there for parents and teens regarding alcohol. Caffeine deserves the same attention. A single can of Celsius or Alani holds about 200 milligrams of caffeine, double the daily limit the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends for teens. Many parents never hear that number. Pair caffeine with alcohol and the risk climbs, because it dulls the drowsiness that might otherwise make someone stop drinking.
So what helps? Dr. Weiner pointed to home as one of the strongest influences on how teens approach substances, right alongside their friends. Some of his guidance runs against instinct. Letting a teen drink at home, on the theory that supervised is safer, has been linked in research to more alcohol problems later, not fewer. Clear expectations paired with honest information tend to work better. Scare tactics usually don’t.
Two habits stood out. The first is to correct the record. In one study, teens who were shown real numbers about peer drinking came away with a more accurate sense of what’s typical, and their own reported drinking went down. The second is frequency over formality. Sixty one-minute conversations do more than one sixty-minute talk, and they keep the topic from feeling like a big event.
Dr. Weiner also encouraged parents to connect choices to what a young person actually cares about. A teen who skips a drink because it doesn’t fit who they want to be holds that line better than one who was simply told “no.” That belief sits at the center of Prime For Life’s work, and it starts with a question worth asking at any age. What matters most to you, and what choices protect those values?
