According to Drug Free America, summer can mean more than swimming, sunning and shopping for some teenagers. June, July and August are also the months in which teens are more likely to try marijuana for the first time. And as much as parents might want their kids get a job and do something useful with themselves, working actually increases the chances that they will experiment with drugs. Not only does a summer job expose them to older - but not old enough to know better - coworkers, they also have all that extra cash to spread around.

Now, I would not take that bit of information and decide that my teen isn't leaving the house until September, but any parent of a teen should be aware of the warning signs of drug use. Some are easy to spot (red, glassy eyes), while others are hard to distinguish from regular teen behavior (mood swings). Parents, The Anti Drug has great information with detailed signs and symptoms of drug use.

Perhaps the best advice I ever got for raising a drug-free teen was this: don't take your eyes off of them until they are 21. Seriously, the teen years are not the time to relax and assume your work is done. As grown up as they seem and as ready as you may be for them to actually be grown up, they are still kids. Most teens are far from ready to face the challenges of peer pressure, curiosity and plain old rebellion on their own. Arm yourself with knowledge and stay close at hand.

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A study released Thursday by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has news that shouldn't surprise any of us: kids who engage in underage drinking most often get their booze from adults, typically their own parents or their friends' parents.

The study consisted of a random sample of 158,000 kids aged 12 to 20 who were questioned about their drinking behaviors. Researchers found that 40 percent of teens reported receiving alcohol for free from an adult in the past 30 days, and that one in 16 got the drinks from a parent or guardian, while one in four said the provider was an unrelated adult. One in 12 were being served by an adult family member who was not their parent.

And of course, some kids -- about four percent -- reported that they simply helped themselves to alcohol in their homes.

Surgeon General Steven K. Galson holds the grown ups responsible for all this underage drinking. "In far too many instances parents directly enable their children's underage drinking -- in essence encouraging them to risk their health and well-being," he says. "Proper parental guidance alone may not be the complete solution to this devastating public health problem -- but it is a critical part."

What makes a few kids swiping some beers from the garage fridge a "devastating public health problem?" How about this: one out of five kids surveyed said that they had taken part in binge drinking during the previous month. A binge is defined as consuming five or more drinks on one occasion. Half of kids participating in the survey reported drinking in someone else's home, while a third said they were drinking in their own houses; a smaller number, less than ten percent, were in a bar or club.

What can you do to keep your kids from becoming a statistic? Model good drinking behavior at home, for starters. Know your children's friends and their parents. And don't be afraid to say no and stick to it.

When you're a parent, the instinct to protect your child is sometimes overwhelming. When my husband stumbled on our concrete porch steps with our older daughter, then just an infant, they both fell... hard. He ended up with scrapes and bruises. She was completely unharmed and even giggled when they landed. I don't know how he did it, but in those short seconds he managed to turn his body just right to keep her safe, even if it meant that he took the brunt of the fall.

Maybe it was her pregnancy that put Amanda Bourque's "mama bear" instincts into overdrive. When a drunk driver narrowly missed hitting her car, Bourque decided that she needed to do something before someone got hurt. So she followed the weaving driver into a convenience store parking lot, where he smashed into a wall and another car before Bourque finally cornered him with her own vehicle.

Bourque's being called a hero and will be nominated for a public service award. Though many people would have called 911 in the same situation, to actually pin down the driver until help arrived definitely took some guts.

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After a recent verdict, many parents in Maui, Hawaii and elsewhere in the US certainly are. Nearly $700,000 was awarded to the parents of Lauren Crossan, an eighteen-year-old who fell to her death from a Maui hotel room. The teen, who was in town with chaperone Susanne Sadler, Susanne's daughter and another teen, was seen drinking alcohol within hours of reaching the hotel.

An arbitrator ordered Sadler to pay $690,000 to Crossan's family after finding the chaperone partially responsible for the girl's death.

Some schools are so concerned over getting into this kind of trouble that they're going so far as to purchase liability insurance. Some parents are considering it as well. Others feel that it's simply the American way to sue rather than accept responsibility for actions. And some fall in between: A lawyer representing the Crossan family, who has represented many such families whose children have been harmed in the care of other parents, basically said that crappy parenting leads to problems.

What do you think? Is it ridiculous for parents to consider purchasing liability insurance to cover themselves when children who are not their own find their way into their care, or is it just a sign of the times?

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Administrators and teachers at a California high school recently announced to their students that several teens had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend. It was devastating news that traumatized students, many of whom had lost good friends.

The problem? It was a big, fat lie.

Administrators came up with the program to discourage teens from drinking and driving.. The plan was to tell students about the accidents in the morning, then reveal the hoax at an assembly in the afternoon.

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There are few greater causes for celebration than a brand new baby, but one Polish mother started her celebrating a bit early, showing up at the delivery room with a blood alcohol level of 0.12, which would be the equivalent of drinking an entire bottle of wine.

At birth, the baby's blood alcohol level was 0.29, a level she should not even be close to attaining until well into her college years. The drunk mother could face up to five years in prison because of the celebration (or self-medication, whichever the case might be) for child endangerment.

I've known several people who drank before they even knew they were pregnant and the guilt over possibly harming the development of fetus they didn't realize was there was crushing. I can't imagine purposely getting drunk knowing full well that the baby is partaking everything you are.

Doctors say so far the baby appears fine and I hope for the child's sake she suffers no ill effects from her mother's poor judgment.

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Music legend Lionel Richie recently had a little fun at his daughter, Nicole Richie's, expense. The singer was speaking at the TV Land Awards where he was being honored with the Icon Award when he had a few words to say about Ms. Richie.

Said Lionel: "Forget about surviving 40 years in the music business. Just surviving 27 and 1/2 years of Nicole Richie has been a struggle and a half." Richie went on to say he was a survivor for all the parents out there.

Nicole got her first shot at fame as Paris Hilton's sidekick in Fox television's The Simple Life. She later made more of a notorious name for herself spending time in jail (all of 82 minutes) after a conviction for driving under the influence of drugs. You may recall she was pulled over after rambling down a one-way street the wrong way. Now Nicole is known more for her three-month-old daughter Harlow than she is for her hard-partying ways. I'm sure Grandpa Lionel is ultimately very proud of her for being able to turn everything around--and giving him what parents always want--a grandbaby!

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For the drunken teens who trashed poet Robert Frost's former home in Ripton Vermont last December, justice has been served in a rather unusual way. As you may recall, a former Middlebury college student threw an impromptu party at the historical farmhouse last year and things got way out of control. The nearly 50 guests broke furniture and china, discharged the fire extinguishers, and ruined the carpet with the by-products of too much drink and drugs. They caused over $10,000 in damage and created quite an uproar in the small Vermont town.

Their day of reckoning has finally arrived and their punishment goes beyond community service and public embarrassment. Twenty-five of the party-goers have been sentenced to attend a poetry class where they will learn about the work of the man whose home they nearly destroyed.

Prosecutor John Quinn explains the unusual punishment: "I guess I was thinking that if these teens had a better understanding of who Robert Frost was and his contribution to our society, that they would be more respectful of other people's property in the future and would also learn something from the experience," he says.

The two-day session is being led by Jay Parini, a Frost biographer and college professor who was happy to donate his time for the cause. He draws on the Frost poem "The Road Not Taken" for its obvious parallels to this case. "This is where Frost is relevant. This is the irony of this whole thing. You come to a path in the woods where you can say, `Shall I go to this party and get drunk out of my mind?"' he said. "Everything in life is choices."

I have my doubts about whether a poetry class could teach a teen about respect for the property of others. But if the professor can just get that one message across - that everything in life really is a choice - maybe these kids will learn to choose their roads more carefully.

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Tatum O'Neal, star of television's hit series Rescue Me and former child celebrity, has been arrested. Ms. O'Neal, daughter of Ryan O'Neal and former wife of tennis champ John McEnroe, who won an Oscar for her performance in Paper Moon, was arrested in New York City for allegedly buying cocaine!

At her arraignment, the actress, now 44, offered no plea. She is due back in court on July 28th. O'Neal has made no small secret of her addiction problems. Recently, she reached out to another troubled young star, Britney Spears, in an effort to help turn the fallen pop starlet's life around.

Police allegedly found two bags of cocaine in one of O'Neal's front pockets after claiming to see her accept them from a man during a routine drug sweep. Prosecutors are recommending drug treatment rather than jail time for the star, who recounts her problems with both heroin and cocaine in a 2004 memoir titled "A Paper Life."

According to Perez Hilton, who always seems to know more (or claims to know more) than the average online media source, O'Neal claims she was researching the part of a junkie and not buying the cocaine for real. Perez also notes she asked the police if they knew who she was when they approached her. I don't care how good an actress she is, i don't think anyone's going to buy that story!

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As a parent, you probably suspected that energy drinks like Red Bull aren't the healthiest things for a teen. But many look the other way when it comes to energy drinks as they are legal and a lot less harmful than a lot of other things the kids could be drinking.

It turns out there's more to energy drinks than meets the eye. For one thing, the caffeine level varies widely from brand to brand. While a 12 oz. Starbucks latte provides a 75 mg of caffeine, the same amount of Amp contains 107 mg and a Spike Shooter jolts the body with 428 mg. Students experiencing health problems after drinking energy drinks have led to schools in several states to ban the beverages.

But something far more troubling than hyperactivity or headaches has been observed in young athletes who regularly consume energy drinks.

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Recently, we had a week where, for various reasons, we were unable to get my son's anxiety medication refilled. He was fine, but MY anxiety level was way up. A friend joking suggested that what we needed was a placebo -- you know, some pretend medication, just to keep him thinking he was taking his meds. "It might make YOU feel better," she said knowingly.

Studies show that in some patients, placebos can indeed reduce symptoms, particularly for things like depression, pain, and high blood pressure. Parents also know that kids are sometimes prone to complaining about illness when really they are just fine, thanks, they just don't feel like mowing the lawn or going to Aunt Edwina's for Sunday dinner. And some kids are just hypochondriacs, convinced that they really ARE ill with no real cause.

According to an article in today's New York Times, Jennifer Buettner's niece was one of those kids, and her complaints got Buettner thinking. What if she could give the niece a placebo and convincer her that she had taken medicine? Trouble was there were no available placebo pills for kids, so Buettner created Obecalp (placebo spelled backwards), which is essentially a sugar pill. Kid complaining about a headache? Obecalp to the rescue! Problem solved.

Maybe. Or maybe not.

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Despite what some people may think, Paris Hilton did not drop onto this earth from Planet Rich Girl , drink in hand and ready to declare things 'hot'. No, she has a mother just like everyone else and that mother, Kathy Hilton, clearly loves her daughter very much. After a year of silence, Kathy is opening up about those terrible days when her eldest daughter spent 45 days in the slammer for violating her DUI probation.

There is nothing earth-shattering or even all that interesting about what Kathy Hilton has to say about Paris' jailhouse experience. Paris was scared, Paris cried, Paris had to wear a scratchy 'jail suit', etc. What she does reveal is an obvious superiority complex. Kathy tells the Daily Mail: "People say: 'Oh she's spoilt, she's this, she's that.' But, until you've walked in someone's shoes for many miles, don't make a judgment call. It's true that life's been comfortable for Paris and jail was probably tougher on her than it would be on, let's say, an everyday person."

As one of those everyday people Kathy refers to, I feel like I should be offended by that last statement. As if your average drunk-driving housewife would find incarceration a piece of cake and not the punishment it was intended to be. But I am not offended because she's right. Paris is different. And in reading Kathy Hilton's words, I begin to understand why.

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Tesco, a large grocery chain in the UK, has angered and bewildered many parents with their new rules regarding alcohol sales. Managers have instructed their cashiers to refuse to sell alcohol to any adult who they suspect may be making the purchase for someone who is underage. Having been told to "err of the side of caution", many cashiers are turning away adult customers who happen to have a child standing next to them. That, of course, includes parents shopping with their children.

It happened to Dominic Zenden. He wasn't allowed to purchase a six-pack of Budweiser because his 15-year-old daughter happened to be with him. "I was dumbfounded," he said. "There was absolutely no indication that my daughter would be drinking the alcohol – it was for me. But the woman told me that they don't sell alcohol to people who have children with them."

39-year-old Debbie Bell had to return a case of Fosters and a bottle of cider to the shelf because her 18-year-old stepson couldn't produce proof of age. She said: "You can't do that just because somebody has kids with them.

A spokesman for Tesco says, "I can understand the frustrations of the customer but I think that any reasonable parent would understand the problem and support our policy."

If think that if Tesco finds any success at all in this new policy, it will likely be due to the fact that adults are going to go elsewhere to purchase alcohol. I know I would.

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In an extreme case of misplaced priorities, an Australian man has been fined for failing to safely secure a five-year-old child in his vehicle. It isn't that he didn't have seat belts in his car, it's just that there weren't any available after all the adults and a 30-can case of beer were buckled in.

Alice Springs constable Wayne Burnett was understandably "shocked and appalled" when he pulled over the unregistered vehicle and discovered the backseat full of safely secured adults and beer and a child perched on the hump of the back seat floor. "I haven't ever seen something like this before," he said. "This is the first time that the beer has taken priority over a child."

Oh, but it isn't. Earlier this year, a woman in Florida was arrested for essentially the same thing. She had a case of beer buckled in the front passenger seat and a sixteen-month-old child unrestrained the the back.

As bad as this is, I suppose it could have been worse. At least these children weren't made to ride in the trunk - where the beer should been in the first place. And what is with all this buckling up of beer? It has never occurred to me to strap in my purchases when driving home. Do normal people do this?

The term 'gateway drug' is used to describe certain lower classed drugs that some believe can lead users to harder, more dangerous drugs. Marijuana, alcohol and cigarettes are all considered by some to be gateway drugs. But lawmakers in Georgia believe there is such a thing as 'gateway candy' and have moved to ban the sale of such confections to minors.

The candies in question are marijuana flavored and lawmakers believe that selling them to underage kids promotes the use of drugs. But this week, Georgia governor Sonny Perdue signed into law a measure that makes it illegal for retailers to sell marijuana flavored candy and other products to anyone under the age of eighteen. The new law takes effect July 1 and anyone found guilty of breaking it will be fined $500.

These candies are sold under names like "Kronic Kandy" and "Pot Suckers" and are usually flavored with hemp essential oil, which is legal. This gives the taste of marijuana without the intoxicating effects.

I had no idea such a candy existed, but according to Senator Doug Stoner (is that his real name?!), that may be because of who I am and where I live. "I don't think that folks are aware this is going on," he says. "It's mainly, from what I can tell, particularly targeted to minority communities."

My first reaction to this story is one of total agreement. Why on earth should a child be eating candy that exists for the sole purpose of imitating the taste of an illegal drug? But then again, why should that candy even exist in the first place?

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