Teen Alcohol Abuse: A Significant Issue
Alcohol abuse statistics reveal that alcohol abuse among teens is increasing in the United States. What are some of the reasons for this? Many alcohol addiction consultants declare that beer, liquor, and wine ads generated by the media are a fundamental reason for the escalation of teenage alcohol abuse.
Other substance abuse specialists argue that the increase in teenage alcohol abuse is due to the toleration and convenience of alcohol in our society.
Still other chemical dependency consultants declare that many of our teenagers involve themselves in harmful drinking due to the increased apprehension that they face.
From a somewhat different outlook, since both parents in more than a few families work, the lack of parental supervision surely has to play a key role in the increase in teen alcohol abuse. And lastly, different alcohol addiction authorities affirm that the increase in adolescent alcohol abuse is due, at some level, to our lax society.
Coping Skills Education and Excessive Drinking
One aspect of adolescent alcohol abuse that appears to be poorly reported in the chemical dependency research findings, nevertheless, is the dearth of educational courses that teach teenagers how to improve upon their coping skills so that their dangerous drinking behavior is extensively decreased or eradicated.
Stated more explicitly, science has disclosed the fact that there is an indirect association between poor coping skills and excessive drinking. For all intents and purposes, this means that the more mediocre the coping skills, the higher the rate of alcohol abuse. To the degree that this is a correct assertion, why isn’t coping skills training an important part of the academic core curriculum in all of our elementary schools, junior high schools, and high schools?
A Society That Underscores Adolescent Coping Skills
Let us construct a scenario for for the purpose of illumination. Let us imagine a society in which students are taught how to achieve sound coping skills all the way from kindergarten up to and including their final year in high school.
In such a society, when life gets demanding, people who are ”coping skills experts” will be able to respond in a more healthy and more rewarding way, contrary to others who fail to implement their coping skills.
More explicitly, students who demonstrate first rate coping skills will be more able to think proactively and engage in top quality decision making as opposed to teenagers who, because they lack quality coping skills, resort to the “quick fix” of abusive drinking.
What would happen in the above “ideal” society, furthermore, if adolescents not only got outstanding coping skills training but also obtained an exceptional education that stressed the long term and short term devastating results associated with drug abuse and alcohol abuse? Emphasizing these drug and alcohol abuse facts, along with more advanced coping skills education, it is declared, would help teens keep away from the clear fascination with adolescent drinking and, for that reason, would significantly lessen the abusive drinking behavior demonstrated by teenagers in our country.
Youth Hazardous Drinking: Conclusion
There are indubitably many well thought-out reasons why so many of our teenagers drink in a harmful manner. Such a tricky problem demands a thorough and more pertinent preventative and educational response by our parents, students, politicians, and educators so that our adolescents can learn how to cope with life’s problems in a more productive and accountable manner instead of gravitating to alcohol abuse to solve their difficulties.
August 25 2009 03:38 pm | Natural health care
