Teen Alcohol Abuse: A Serious Problem
Thursday, April 30th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
Alcohol abuse statistics reveal that alcohol abuse among teenagers is increasing in the United States. What are some of the reasons for this? More than a few alcohol dependency authorities stress the point that wine, beer, and liquor ads produced by the media are an important reason for the escalation of teen alcohol abuse.
Other chemical dependency specialists think that the increase in youth alcohol abuse is due to the toleration and ease of access of wine, beer, and liquor in our society.
Still other alcohol abuse consultants claim that more than a few of our teens involve themselves in risky drinking because of the increased stress that they feel.
From a somewhat different vantage point, due to the fact that both parents in many families work full or part-time, the lack of parental supervision clearly has to play a primary role in the escalation of teen alcohol abuse. And lastly, an assortment of alcohol addiction experts think that the spread of adolescent alcohol abuse is due, in some way, to our “anything goes” society.
Coping Skills Training and Excessive Drinking
One element of teenage alcohol abuse that appears to be somewhat missing in the alcoholism research literature, nonetheless, is the lack of educational courses that teach teens how to upgrade their coping skills so that their risky drinking behavior is fundamentally reduced or exterminated.
More to the point, scientific research has made obvious the fact that there is an indirect association between poor coping skills and hazardous drinking. Basically, this means that the more mediocre the coping skills, the greater the occurrence of alcohol abuse. To the degree that this is a truthful argument, why isn’t coping skills training a key part of the educational core curriculum in all of our high schools, junior high schools, and elementary schools?
A Society That Stresses Youth Coping Skills
Let us manufacture a scenario for the purpose of explanation. Let us imagine a society in which all individuals are trained how to develop excellent coping skills all the way from kindergarten up to and including their final year in high school.
In such a society, when life gets complicated, students who are ”coping skills experts” will be able to respond in a more healthy and more rewarding way, as opposed to others who fail to put their coping skills into operation.
Stated another way, students who reveal solid coping skills will be more able to think logically and demonstrate top quality decision making as opposed to teenagers who, because they were unsuccessful in their attempts to learn top-of-the-line coping skills, gravitate to the “quick fix” of abusive drinking.
What would happen in the above “ideal” society, in addition, if teenagers not only received excellent coping skills education but also got an exceptional education that underscored the long term and short term destructive consequences associated with drug abuse and alcohol abuse? Such an emphasis on drug and alcohol abuse facts, along with more highly developed coping skills training, it is declared, would help teenagers avoid the clear attraction with youth drinking and, as a result, would drastically reduce the abusive drinking behavior shown by adolescents in our country.
Adolescent Hazardous Drinking: Conclusion
There are certainly many justifiable reasons why so many of our teens drink in an injurious manner. Such a complicated predicament demands a thorough and more applicable educational and preventative response by our educators, students, parents, and politicians so that our teens can learn how to cope with life’s problems in a more rewarding and responsible manner instead of gravitating to injurious drinking behavior to solve their difficulties.
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