First ladies sign on to help spread message to parents

By CAROL STUART
For Brentwood Home Page
More than half of all teenagers’ deaths in accidents, murders and suicides – the top three causes of deaths among teens – are related to alcohol, according to retired pediatrician Dr. Parnell Donahue of Brentwood.

Dr. Par Donahue with his 13 grandchildren, 10 of whom live in Brentwood including 2011 Brentwood High valedictorian Eric and Ravenwood recent graduate Harry, who will attend West Point.

Donahue’s book on how to be a hands-on parent, Messengers in Denim: The Amazing Things Parents Can Learn From Teens (2010), is being used by the Leadership To Keep Children Alcohol Free Foundation to help parents talk to kids about drinking. The group is comprised of current and former governors’ spouses.

"Kids need to know it's illegal for kids to drink and they shouldn't,” Donahue said. “Not only that, but they need to know that drinking as teenagers and kids, even those under 24 years of age, has an effect on their developing brain. Especially binge drinking is really harmful to these kids as far as their personality development is concerned.”

Donahue says kids who drink before the age of 15 have a 6 to 10 times greater risk of developing problems with alcohol as adults. He says parents often send mixed messages – such as talking about how they “got wasted” in college – and that they also need to drink responsibly.

“It destroys their judgment,” he said of teens consuming alcohol. “It's responsible for more than half of all of teenagers' deaths in accidents, murder and suicide.”

Although he has a couple of chapters on drug abuse and alcohol use, Donahue didn’t write the book for specific use in the Leadership’s READS (Reality Education for Adolescent Development and Success) campaign. However, former Ohio first lady Hope Taft’s husband brought home a flyer about his book signing at the University of Dayton, checked out the book and attended the signing.

“I liked the title and decided to go,” said Hope Taft, CEO and president of the Alcohol Free group. “I liked his presentation, read his book and asked him to join our effort to create a 'book club' type initiative that would help parents be more effective in the toughest job they will ever have.”

Book clubs around nation will study 'Messengers in Denim'

Messengers In Denim will be used in book clubs around the country, where different governors’ spouses start a book club and then those leaders go back to their towns and hold their own groups. Donahue has now co-written a book discussion guide with Dr. Bonnie Hedrick to be used for the groups, which started in Indiana this month and soon will be used by Nevada first lady Kathleen Sandoval. (He met with the staff of new Tennessee first lady Chrissy Haslam on Tuesday, and she will consider getting involved.)

Taft had already proposed using Donahue’s book in this way before a recent study said that general parenting and preventative measures are a better deterrent than a program that just focuses on teen drinking, Donahue said.

“The book is written in a nonjudgmental, easy-to-read style that should make parents receptive to the good information and illustrations it contains,” Taft said. “I like the fact that the advice is from a teen’s perspective.  By using the community reads /book club concept, we have taken the stigma of going to parenting classes away.  Anyone and everyone can go to a book club without fear of being considered a 'bad' parent.”

According to the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, about 8,000 kids under the age of 17 start to drink every day, Taft noted. She has been involved in alcohol and other drug prevention since 1987.

“I quickly realized that if you could prevent or delay kids from starting to drink, you could prevent a multitude of problems,” she said. “I also learned from the research, that kids really do listen to their parents – and need help and guidance from parents to stay alcohol- and other drug-free.”

Donahue, who practiced 40 years in Wisconsin and Atlanta, was seeing mostly adolescent patients when he decided to begin writing Messengers in Denim a few years back. He uses their stories, plus some from his four children (all who have doctorates) and even grandchildren, to help parents.

“Everybody hates teenagers, they're afraid of them, they think they're the worst group in the world, but I really like them,” Donahue said. “And over the years kids would tell me things they were pretty insightful. And as they did that, I thought more and more people need to see what these kids are really thinking. I started writing them down.”

One boy, for instance, told him he tried to have dinner with his dad every night.

“I asked why, and he said ‘because he's not mad then,’” Donahue recalled. “He said, ‘He's really nice when he's eating, he laughs and we have fun, but as soon as we get done with dinner, he just sits in front of his TV set, then ignores us. So I just love to have dinner with him.’ ”

Another boy, in discussing how to prevent such things as the Columbine shooting, told Dr. Donahue and his father: “Well, if parents would turn off their TVs and pay attention to the kids, they could be a part of their life.”

There's 'peer pressure to do the right thing'

Donahue, whose grandson Eric was 2011 valedictorian of Brentwood High and grandson Harry from Ravenwood is entering West Point, said he also wants to debunk the idea of peer pressure in the book.

Dr. Par Donahue with his dog Belle

“Too often we say well because of peer pressure, kids have all this stress. But I think kids have the stress of peer pressure to do the right thing,” he said. “If you want to go out tonight or you want to stay home and study – ‘Well my friends are all going to get A's, I should study, too.’ That's a positive.

“I don't think peer pressure can make you do anything that you don't want to do. Think about your own life. How many things did you when you were a teenager that you didn't want to do because someone forced you to or made you? But if you kind of would like to do that and now you got a guy to do it with, then you do it.”

One of the teen patients in his book, for example, said a kid who smokes isn’t going to hang out with kids who don’t smoke and “have them complain about your smoking all the time. You're going to find dummies like yourself who want to smoke. … If you don't smoke, you're not going to get someone as a friend that smokes.”

Donahue also said hormones aren’t an excuse for how teens act, either. He says most trouble happens in the evening or at night, but that the rush of hormones happens when kids are asleep and are highest around 5 a.m.

“Most kids, even the ones having trouble, are not getting in trouble that time of the night,” he said.

“We need to stop making excuses for our kids, stop accepting excuses from our kids, and stop accepting excuses from ourselves.”

Donahue’s book is available at Landmark Bookstore in Franklin, St. Mary’s in Nashville and online at Amazon, Barnes Noble and Borders, plus is available for Kindle (Brentwood's Borders can order it on request). The book discussion guide can be downloaded for free at www.alcoholfreechildren.org (click here) along with video footage, and he has a 3-minute parenting course at his www.messengersindenim.org website (click here).

The doctor still works a couple days a week conducting physical exams on incoming military members at the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) and also fills in at Life Signs in Brentwood. Three of his children are on the faculty at Vanderbilt School of Medicine and his daughter is a faculty member at Dayton.

Noting that “wisdom comes too late,” Donahue said he was hard on his kids but his family still had plenty of fun. “I have a really wonderful wife – she's always had her head on straight, even when I didn't, she did,” he said, laughing.

He said when he asked his adolescent patients if their parents were stricter than other parents or easier, kids often would say “They used to be really tough on me, but now that I got older they're really easy.” The reason?  “Well, they know I'm not going to get in trouble.”

Other kids, however, would say “Well, they used to be really easy, but now they got tough,” he said. When he asked why, they said: “Well I'm always getting in trouble.”