Adolescents are natural experimenters. As your children and their friends approach the age when they are more likely to engage in risky behaviours, such as drinking, smoking, using other drugs or gambling, you may want to know how to prevent your teen from experimenting with these activities or at least keep them to a minimum. This can be a scary time for adolescents as well as their parents. Teens will face the pressures to experiment with alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, and may want to explore some gambling activities. As parents, you will face difficult situations, balancing your teen’s need to become more independent and autonomous while still providing the guidance and monitoring teens need at this time.

Written in chatty, down-to-earth language, What Parents Need to Know about Teens: Strategies for Reducing the Risks of Alcohol, Tobacco, Other Drugs and Gambling addresses the challenges and risks that appear as your children move into adolescence. It suggests strategies for guiding your teens and maintaing good relationships with them as they move through this stage of development. Topics include: why adolescence is important; why teens experiment and take risks (and why some don’t); and when experimenting becomes a problem.

This booklet follows What Parents Need to Know about Teens: Facts, Myths and Strategies, which focuses on what’s considered normal adolescent behaviour, how to determine whether your child is on a good path, how to encourage your teen’s healthy development, and how to get help when problems arise.

David A. Wolfe, PhD, ABPP, is a psychologist specializing in issues affecting children and youth — including prevention of bullying.

After completing his PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of South Florida in 1980, David Wolfe pursued an academic career in Canada focusing on child abuse and domestic violence. He holds the inaugural RBC Chair in Children’s Mental Health at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and heads the CAMH Centre for Prevention Science in London, Ontario. He is also Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Toronto. Since 2007 he has served as Editor-in-Chief of Child Abuse & Neglect: The International Journal.

David has received the Donald O. Hebb Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Science from the Canadian Psychological Association, and the Blanche L. Ittleson Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Delivery of Childrens Services and the Promotion of Childrens Mental Health from the American Orthopsychiatric Association. His books include Adolescent Risk Behaviors: Why teens experiment and strategies to keep them safe (with P. Jaffe & C. Crooks; Yale University Press, 2006); Child abuse: Implications for child development and psychopathology, 2nd Edition (Sage, 1999); and Abnormal Child Psychology, 4th edition (with E. Mash; Wadsworth, 2009).

His interests in violence prevention have culminated into a comprehensive school-based initiative for reducing adolescent violence and related risk behaviors, known as the Fourth R. The Fourth R is currently used in over 800 high schools throughout Canada. It was recently identified as a top evidence-based program for school-based violence prevention by the New Jersey-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where it is being implemented in several US sites as part of their national violence-prevention initiative.

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