North Shore teens are more likely to be drinking booze and smoking both tobacco and pot than their provincial peers.
They’re also more likely to own a cellphone and — like other teens across the province — are often on it when they should be doing something else, like sleeping.
Those tidbits are among the pieces of information contained in the recently released adolescent health study for the North Shore – Garibaldi region, conducted by the non-profit McCreary Centre Society every five years. About 30,000 students in grades 7 to 12 took part in the study between February and June of 2013.
Although six school districts were included in the North Shore – Garibaldi results, the largest number of students who took part were in North and West Vancouver.
While the kids are all right in relative terms, rates of alcohol use are still a concern on the North Shore, said Annie Smith, executive director of the McCreary Society.
While fewer students (52 per cent) had tried booze than had a decade earlier (when 64 per cent of students said they’d tried alcohol), that number remains higher than the provincial average of 45 per cent.
More teens on the North Shore who are hitting the bottle are also binge drinking. Among those who said they’d tried booze, 50 per cent said they’d had five or more drinks within a couple of hours on at least one occasion in the month before the survey. That compares to 39 per cent provincially.
More teens (25 per cent) in North and West Vancouver have also tried smoking than their counterparts across the province (where the percentage of teens who have tried tobacco is about 21 per cent.) More local teens (33 per cent) have also tried smoking marijuana than teens across the province (where 26 per cent have tried it.)
The study also showed that parents concerned about their teens’ sleep habits might want to get those electronic devices out of kids’ bedrooms.
A whopping 93 per cent of local teens have cellphones, more than the provincial average. Of those, 78 per cent admitted they were online, surfing the web or texting when they were supposed to be asleep.
Perhaps not surprisingly, only 58 per cent of teens are getting enough sleep, a factor the study revealed is very closely associated with better mental health.
Nine per cent of students also admitted to using their phone for “sexting.”
Mental health was a greater concern than physical health for most teens, especially for girls, who were more likely than boys to report extreme stress and having felt suicidal.
Up to 20 per cent of students reported having had concussions.
About 16 per cent of those said they didn’t get any medical help for that — either because their parents didn’t take it seriously or they feared being benched from a sports team, said Smith.
On the positive side of the health ledger, teens on the North Shore reported generally high levels of family and community connectedness, eating nutritious foods and a high level of neighbourhood safety.
