Host: What can I do to keep my child from drinking? Judith Welles Cousins: As a parent, what you can do to keep your teen or really doing what you can do to ensure to the best of your ability that a teen is not going to use drugs or alcohol is to model reasonable and positive behavior in terms and healthy behavior in terms of your own, your own alcohol use and modeling the abstinence of the use of other drugs, including -- and I would include medication in that meaning, using medication in a way that's reasonable and for the purposes of getting healthy and not abusing that in anyway. So modeling is really the key and I said that to my family that I work with over and over is modeling the kind of behavior that you want to see your teen use.

So that's the -- I think that is probably the most important thing. Several other things that you can do to keep your child from using is to be very engaged with your teenager, to monitor your teenagers which teenagers really don't want to hear or they don't like that, but providing enough supervision and enough freedom, so that teen is learning how to be self-responsible, but also is not entirely on their own, making their own decisions. 1