When I was in high school, I was pretty busy during the week. Lots of homework and activities to do. But my weekends were pretty free. I'd hang out with my friends, go to the movies and things like that. I wasn't a bad kid and I didn't have bad friends. We were all pretty good natured, christian kids who just liked to have fun and be around each other. It wasn't until my senior year in high school that I really even went to any of the weekend parties that I had heard so much about in class on Mondays.
Apparently, these parties went on at the same house almost every Saturday night. So, my buds and I started going to them. There we saw lots of things which we would have been better off not seeing. People were "making out", drinking, and smoking cigarettes. No drugs thankfully, (except alcohol), but just about everything else.
I read an article recently in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence. The authors published an article that I could have written in high school as part of my language arts class. In this paper, "the researchers" tell us that kids don't usually smoke much during the week, but do most of it on the weekends. Yet one more ground shaking article. Do we really need research to tell us this? I think most of us knew this already. The scientists, and I use this term loosely, want to communicate to us that we should frame youth quit smoking strategies in this weekend binge picture. Well, thanks for sharing.
Listen, if I were talking to high school kids about quitting, the weekend binge phenomona would not be the cornerstone of my plan. But I guess this info is important to know, officially that is. So if you are a parent, remember that your kids are going to go to weekend parties. There, they'll see stuff that you saw when you went to weekend parties. Tell them what to stay away from. Tell them why to stay away from it. Then take them out for some ice cream and let them know it's okay to still be and act like a kid.
