It’s Spring Break time. You know what that means, right? Of course you do - the customary articles about binge drinking. This is the part where everyone over the age of 30 tries to pretend they didn’t get drunk and stoned out of their mind while they were in college, that it’s just us ‘young kids’ that are getting in trouble, and, ohmygosh, we need to do something about this!

Look, I’m 26. I’ll admit something right here and now - I did my fair share of binge drinking. I also have smoked pot. That’s as far as I’ve ever gone; I’m not a big fan of doing anything that might lead to chemical dependence, though I do have a raging caffeine addiction. So, I’m going to lay out for everyone why I did this in the first place:

1. It wasn’t because of any commercials. Other than the Budweiser ones when I was in high school, it’s been a while since I’ve experienced any memorable alcohol ones. Oh, and for the record, I don’t drink beer - I don’t like the taste. I’m a gin & tonic guy, personally. Yes, I like Tanqueray, but that was long before that smarmy guy started advertising it and, frankly, I think I liked it more before those commercials.

2. Because I could - even with a fair amount of substance abuse, I was still able to pull down a 2.5 GPA at UNR. If I didn’t get drunk and stoned, could I have received a higher GPA? Sure, though I doubt I would have - to be honest, I was interested in school for the diploma, not so much for the material. Some of it was interesting and, in those classes, I did reasonably well. The rest of them, on the other hand, I did just well enough to pass.

3. College is well subsidized, sort of. I received many a Pell Grant and many a Stafford Loan (yeah, paying those back is a pain). Long story short, while I was in college, I was pulling down nearly $30k/year between financial aid and my 20-hour-a-week job doing clerical work for a non-profit. This number was after tuition, by the way, and like any good college student, I kept my expenses low - my cars were always about 10 years old or so, I lived with roommates, and I ate like crap (hello mac & cheese!). So, I had a fair amount of disposable income that wasn’t quite disposable enough to get anything really cool, but definitely disposable enough to blow some money on drinks from time to time. Of course, without that job, I might’ve had enough energy to study a little more, but I wouldn’t have had enough money to really survive, and besides, maybe I would’ve just blown the time on more substance abuse anyways. Who knows?

All right, so, you want to know how to make this kind of behavior stop. I’ll lay it out for you - this is what kept me away from it during my first couple of years of college:

1. Look at the party school list. Now, look at the stone cold sober schools. Notice a pattern? I’ll spell it out for you - the party schools are, for the most part, large public schools that let just about anybody in. The stone cold sober schools are religious institutions, military academies, and tech schools, all of which with very severe requirements. Guess what - if you have to care to get into the school, you’re not going to jeopardize it. If going to a university is your God-given right as an Iowan/Texan/whatever, well, expect people to treat it like high school where you’re away from your parents and can actually drink. Gee, I wonder how people will react in an environment like that?

2. Scare the kids. During my freshmen and sophomore years, I was deathly afraid of school - the homework was piling up, the grades were slipping, all hell was breaking loose. You bet I stayed sober… at least at first. This brings me to #3.

3. Don’t scare them TOO much. You want people to be challenged, but you don’t want them to feel like the struggle is impossible. Once it’s impossible, people just give up. Make sure there are resources for people to get involved in. One thing I noticed during my experiences with the LDS church (I might explain that one in another blog post - let’s just say it involved a girl and leave it at that for now) is that, when people start to slip in some fashion or another (lost job, sleeping around, found at a bar, whatever), the entire church mobilizes to help that person out with whatever’s bugging them. This isn’t just a bunch of volunteers stepping in, either - it’s systematic, organized, and often quite effective. In short, once someone begins to think that nobody cares about them, everyone proves them wrong. That’s a pretty powerful feeling to experience.

To be honest, I did my heaviest drinking and drug use after I took a couple of years off from school. When I came back, most of my university friends had already graduated or were at least far and away ahead of me in their coursework. Since I was married when I came back, I had to work, which meant I didn’t have a lot of time to really socialize with anyone - I had obligations at home and work and, as a consequence, really didn’t relate with most anyone at school anyways. Once I got divorced, there was one thing I could relate with - the need to do some heavy drinking. Of course, the students doing that weren’t the ones that were serious with their schoolwork anyways.

Since it’s getting late and I’m rambling pretty bad right about now, I’m going to try to wrap this up and summarize it.

If you don’t want your son/daughter/niece/nephew/brother/sister/whatever to binge drink and live like there’s no tomorrow, make sure they want a tomorrow. Encourage them to have dreams - this means they’ll need to sit still long enough to actually dream, which means that overscheduling them with various time-consuming activities probably isn’t going to help as much as you’d think. Make sure they realize that, if they’re going to succeed, they have to want to succeed because they want whatever their end goal is, not because their parents want that end goal. Most importantly, though, don’t be surprised if they experiment a little anyways, especially during vacations like spring break, just to find out what all the fuss is about - who knows, maybe they’ll be President some day.