You may be wondering how prescription drugs can be dangerous to your children, weren’t they prescribed by a doctor for you? Without proper care, they can cause severe harm.
Children and teenagers may abuse prescription drugs for different reasons. A toddler can see your yellow pills on the table, think they are sweets and eat them. Your teenager may be facing peer pressure from friends to also experiment drugs and he or she can use prescription drugs like cough syrup, pain medications or other pills to get that high feeling too. Worse, you are less likely to know if this is happening compared to if your child was smoking or drinking.
What can you do as a parent?
- Monitor the drugs in your house. Do an inventory on what drugs you have available and know how many you have.
- Secure the prescription drugs. You can keep them under lock and key or just keep them out of reach especially for children.
- Dispose drugs you are no longer using or drugs that have expired. Throw them away.
With these three precautions in place, you would have drastically reduced the chance of any emergencies arising from overdose of prescription drugs. Did you learn something new? Let us know in the comments section.
