That’s right, LCAT has formed a new partnership with the Lodi Sports and Recreation Center.  Our meetings will now be held every third Thursday of the month at the Lodi Sports and Recreation Center (LSRC) from 5-6 PM starting in September.   If you have not attended a Community Action Team Meeting, this would be a great time for you to come by and see what’s happening.   After the meeting be sure to check out the rest of the facilities.

This is just a start, so look for more to come from this LCAT and LSRC partnership!

There are specific times in a child’s life that place him or her at increased risk for using alcohol, tobacco and other drugs…heading back to school is one of them. If your child is entering middle school, high school or moving to a new school, you will need to be especially vigilant. But even a change in grade level, teachers, coaches or friends may be cause enough for added stress that can also lead to experimentation with alcohol, tobacco and other drugs.

Read More ->

This artical is from Know!

Did you know your parenting style can affect your child’s choices surrounding alcohol? A recent study reveals the relationship between four basic parenting styles and how each style impacts a child’s drinking behaviors.

First of all, consider what type of parenting you practice:

(Support refers to your availability and the warmth you display toward your child.)

(Control refers to discipline, accountability and how closely you monitor your child.)

Authoritative: High Support/High Control    

Authoritarian: Low Support/High Control

Indulgent: High Support/Low Control           

Neglectful: Low Support/Low Control

If you fall under the description of indulgent, you may want to reconsider your parenting style.

Read More - This artical is from Know!  

Know! is a collaborative effort of Drug-Free Action Alliance and The United Way of Central Ohio. Know! is proud to report a continuously growing number of parents, prevention agencies, community leaders, coalitions, businesses and educators who share the goal of preventing and reducing the use of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs.

It is that time again to start our Parents Who Host Yard Sign campaign.   You have probably noticed signs going up around town and wished you had one of your own to put up in your yard.   Well, the good news is that we have plenty would be happy to drop by and put it up for you.  If you would like a sign, just drop an email to sricks@mac.com or call 608-566-5614.  We are looking for people in high traffic areas and areas out of the City of  Lodi, but we have enough for everyone.

Take advantage of a GREAT opportunity!
Hope House of South Central Wisconsin, in partnership with the Columbia County Family Resource Center, is hosting
Darkness to Light’s Stewards of Children Sexual Abuse Prevention Training
Tuesday, April 20, 5-8pm Family Resource Center 2946 Red Fox Fun, Portage

Stewards of Children is a comprehensive sexual abuse prevention training program that educates adults to prevent, recognize, and react responsibly to child sexual abuse. The Stewards of Children program is designed for organizations that serve children and adolescents, providing prevention training for staff, volunteers, parents, and other interested adults.

Core Features of the Stewards of Children Training:

• A video integrating segments of sexual abuse survivors relating their stories of violation and healing, with segments from the author of the curriculum and from professionals who interface daily with the problem of sexual abuse.
• An interactive workbook for each participant.
• Discussion about critical issues in sexual abuse prevention and the relevance of these issues within organizations that serve children and adolescents. Led by an authorized facilitator.

Cost: Free, registration required:
Please RSVP to the Family Resource Center at 608-742-8482.
For more information about the program, visit www.darkness2light.org.

April 20 Stewards of Children training poster

Here is a very interesting article from the HomeWord website, on the so called benefits of social drinking and teen girls. The full article can be viewed here.

Benefits of Teen Drinking Do Not Outweigh the Dangers
Author:    Jim Liebelt
Not long ago, I came across a news report entitled, “Beers With Friends May Help Teen Girls”. Given my convictions about teen at-risk behaviors like teen drinking, I’d rather ignore headlines like this. But, as one who keeps track of youth culture items, I feel obligated to write about research that points out both current dangers and positive trends, and studies that fit my convictions as well as those that do not. This is one of those times.

As you can easily decipher by the excerpt title, research done by Purdue University has found that there are some benefits to high school girls who sneak out for some beer occasionally with their friends. My first response is to reject the notion for a whole host of reasons, some of which I’ll note below. Still, it’s important to note that often research doesn’t deal with morality and values, just behavior and effect. So, taken at face value, I can see how the study reached its conclusion.

According to the excerpt below, it seems the study focused on the outcome of high school girls who occasionally sneak a few beers with friends. Researchers found that the girls who do this are less depressed due to the ability to “blow off steam, get together, have fun, joke around with their peers.”

Okay, again on face value, teen drinking is typically a social behavior. Not many occasional teen drinkers are going to be found pounding beers by themselves.

So, couldn’t another legitimate conclusion have been reached had the study not focused on beer drinking, but rather the outcomes of teen social interaction, or even other behaviors that foster teen social interaction? In other words, I would argue that teens who get together “blow off steam, get together, have fun, joke around with their peers” are likely to see the same benefits regardless of what they do when they are together.

Perhaps someone will come up with a better analogy, but what follows is simply what I thought of first. What if the focus of the behavior that resulted in the beneficial teen social interaction had been texting while driving? Teens text a lot today. According to surveys, many teens admit to texting while driving. If texting while driving allows them to “blow off steam, get together, have fun, joke around with their peers,” would it then follow to be a good idea to do so even if the result was that teens would be found to be less depressed? I don’t think anyone will do research into this, for the obvious dangers of texting while driving outweigh any potential benefit!

I would argue the same for high school girls sneaking out to have some beers with friends. First, doing so is against the law (generally — unless there are some very old high school girls.) Call me old-fashioned, but this in itself, makes the behavior wrong, no matter what the potential benefit there might be socially. Further, there have been studies which have shown that teen drinking can lead to dangerous consequences, such as driving while drinking, and making it more likely that occasional drinking can lead to heavier drinking, drunkenness, alcoholism, and other at-risk behaviors.

As a result, I’ve concluded that the potential dangers of teen drinking far outweigh any potential benefits.

My advice to parents: stay the course in setting clear expectations with your teens regarding drinking. There’s a good possibility that your kids will experiment with alcohol before they graduate from high school, but hang in there. Doing what you can to help prevent your kids from drinking is the best course of action.

Further, help your kids find alternative, safer ways to “blow off steam, get together, have fun, joke around with their peers.” There’s no doubt in my mind that kids benefit from healthy social interaction with their peers — and with a little homework and communication with your teens, you surely can find better options than drinking beer!

Here’s the excerpt from the article which appeared in the Ottawa Citizen, “Beers With Friends May Help Teen Girls”:

Sneaking an occasional beer with friends could actually be a good thing for teens — especially girls –according to new research that upends typically negative views on teens and alcohol.

Timothy Owens, a sociology professor at Purdue University in Indiana, found that high school girls who drank once or twice with their friends in the past month were less likely to feel depressed than those who didn’t.

“The realistic explanation is that teens drink for a lot of reasons, and one of them is to blow off steam, get together, have fun, joke around with their peers,” Owens says.

“Getting out with their friends and maybe having a few beers can actually have a positive effect on some, especially girls. It can loosen them up, but even more important, it gets them interacting with their peers.”

And because girls especially value building and maintaining social relationships, it seems to have a positive effect on how they feel,” he adds.

“We forget a lot of that in our research because most research is oriented toward addressing a problem, rather than looking at the normal experiences of teenagers,” Owens says.

“We wanted to look at it open-mindedly.”

The research included more than 1,000 high school students, and the results are published in the Journal of Adolescence.

Source: Ottawa Citizen

Thanks to everyone that was able to make the town hall meetings.   I believe that it was a very successful event.  The Panel was awesome and were able to answer some very difficult questions and gave out lots of very good advice.   I know that I learned a lot from the evening and it was time well spent.   We will look at doing more of these type of events in the future and if you have any ideas for issues that you would like us to address, just leave a comment, send an email, or give me a call.

Thanks to everyone that put this together and participated and a special thanks to both the Lodi Sports and Recreation Center for hosting it and to the Kalahari for providing the door prize.

Lodi area community members will have another opportunity to safely dispose of unused and expired medications by bringing them to the Lodi Police Station at 142 S Main on Saturday May 15 from 10:00am to 2:00pm. The first drug round up was a huge success and we collected over 500 containers of medications. The Lodi Police Department will assume control of the drugs and they will be safely disposed of at no charge. Please leave the medication in its original container but cross out names while still keeping the name of the medication legible.

There are numerous reasons why it is important to safely dispose of unused drugs:

-Medications flushed down the toilet may contaminate our lakes, streams and ground water causing harm to humans, wildlife and vegetation.

-Medications thrown in trash can cause poisoning by accidental ingestion by young children, pets and even wildlife.

- A survey of teenagers by the Partnership for Drug-Free America found that 1in 5 teens has tried Vicodin, and 1 in 10 have tried OxyContin, both powerful narcotic pain relievers. 1 in 10 teens has abused cough medicine. One of the most common means for young people to obtain drugs is by getting them from grandparent’s medicine cabinets

-Misuse and abuse of prescription drugs is growing throughout the U.S.  and is negatively impacting millions of youth, adults and families.

What can you bring?

All prescription and over the Counter medication will be accepted including: pills, spray, liquids capsules, inhalers, ointments, patches, and creams.

This program is being sponsored by: LCAT; Lodi Community Action Team, LATV; Lodi Area Teen Vision, Lodi Leadership Council in LHS, and the Lodi Police Department.

Let’s all work together to create a healthy safer community.

The Lodi Enterprise has an article on the K.I.D.S. town hall meeting.   Several of our members are included in the article and it is a very good representation of what we hope to get.

“I want parents to know that this is not a meeting to say ‘parents, you should not be drinking yourselves,’ or ‘parents you’ve been doing a bad job’, that’s not what this is about,” Persike said. “This is just a bunch of people getting together and saying here are some questions we have as a community. Where can we improve, where can we focus our time and energy and funds?”

Follow the link for the complete story.