by Mark Weber relates to graduation and drinking

Tuxedo rental shops are taking orders and the limo business is picking up.

It's high school party season, that spring interlude between prom and graduation that makes for festive occasions: late-night bashes at hotel suites, impromptu celebrations at the beach, a getty here, a getty there -- and trouble lurking everywhere.

I'm worried.

I don't know if I can survive another version of Forty Days of Teens Getting Sauced, modern America's version of biblical temptation.

Unless you've been holed up in the mountains of Afghanistan, you know all too well that alcohol -- beer usually, but straight shots, too -- is our high schoolers' drug of choice. Chugging until you stagger is especially commonplace as the academic year winds down and the freedom of summer beckons.

This is scary, and frustrating, and a painful reminder of parental impotency

Even if your child doesn't drink, she may be unlucky enough -- heck, foolish enough -- to be in the same car, the same room, the same road as someone else's drunk kid. While we parents may want to believe otherwise, teen drinking isn't an isolated incident, the kind of dysfunctional behavior exhibited only by other people's sons and daughters.

It's "everybody's" problem.

An annual survey of U.S. youth shows that more than three-fourths of 12th graders, nearly two-thirds of 10th graders, and more than two in five eighth graders have consumed alcohol at some point in their lives. What's more, there's something about this time of year -- is it the after-prom revelry in hotel suites? The bittersweet partings at end-of-year shindigs? -- that prompt an in-your-face quality to underage imbibing.

Only the clueless among us can claim immunity. I have enough stories, recounted by my older children or their friends, to fill a bible of worry. The 17-year-old girl who ended up in the emergency room because of alcohol poisoning. The son of the PTSA president who passed out in the public bathroom. The academic star who swiped liquor from his father's stash. The teen whose parents were sued after a friend left his party drunk and crashed.

So as my niece shops around for shoes to match her gown, I fret less about the perfect color and more about the merrymaking that is sure to follow. And when my son asks that his only suit be dry-cleaned in time for next weekend's Big Party, I worry that a lifetime of lectures, speeches and teachable moments may prove to be no match for peer pressure and the inexplicable attraction teens feel for the new and the risque.

Nonetheless, this year, as in the past, I'll appeal to reason and caution by enumerating the facts.

About 5,000 young people die each year as a result of underage drinking. Drunk drivers between the ages of 16 to 20 are twice as likely to be involved in a fatal crash as those 21 or older. And the younger you indulge, the more problems you later have, both mentally and physically. In fact, if a kid starts to drink before 15, he is five times more likely to develop alcohol issues than if he waits until he is 21.

Life, I've always told my children, is all about choices

What we do, or fail to do, determines the path we take, the friends we make, the joys we share, the regrets we nurse.

Choices start now.

Think of it this way: Party season is like open rehearsal. I pray they know their lines.

 

©, The Miami Herald Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

 

High School Party Season: Dangerous Time for Kids