Teen Alcohol Abuse: A Difficult Issue
Posted by Renee on October 26th, 2009 filed in Uncategorized
Recent alcohol abuse statistics demonstrate the fact that alcohol abuse among teenagers is increasing in the United States. What are some of the reasons for this? Numerous alcoholism experts affirm that beer, wine, and liquor ads generated by the media are a major reason for the spread of teen alcohol abuse.
Other alcohol abuse authorities argue that the increase in teen alcohol abuse is due to the acceptability and convenience of liquor, beer, and wine in our society.
Still other alcohol dependency specialists articulate that many of our teens involve themselves in harmful drinking because of the increased tension that they go through.
From a slightly different perspective, because both parents in a number of families work full or part-time, the lack of parental supervision positively has to play a major part in the escalation of teen alcohol abuse. And finally, an assortment of alcohol abuse consultants declare that the spread of adolescent alcohol abuse is due, at least partially, to our permissive society.
Excessive Drinking and Coping Skills Education
One facet of adolescent alcohol abuse that seems to be poorly reported in the alcoholism research literature, alternatively, is the deficiency of educational programs that teach students how to upgrade their coping skills so that their risky drinking behavior is significantly reduced or exterminated.
More precisely, science has revealed that there is an indirect connection between poor coping skills and excessive drinking. Fundamentally, this means that the more mediocre the coping skills, the greater the frequency of alcohol abuse. To the extent that this is an accurate claim, why isn’t coping skills instruction an important part of the educational prospectus in all of our high schools, junior high schools, and elementary schools?
A Society That Highlights Youth Coping Skills
Let us construct a scenario for descriptive purposes. 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 the twelfth grade.
In such a society, when life gets stressful, individuals who are “coping skills masters” will be able to respond in a more healthy and more successful manner, contrary to others who are unsuccessful in their attempts to put their coping skills into action.
Stated another way, students who reveal first-class coping skills will be more able to think clearly and display top quality decision making as opposed to students who, because they do not possess top quality coping skills, gravitate to the “quick fix” of excessive drinking.
What would happen in the above “ideal” society, what’s more, if teens not only got extraordinary coping skills instruction but also got a top quality education that emphasized the long term and short term destructive outcomes associated with drug abuse and alcohol abuse? Emphasizing these kinds of drug and alcohol abuse facts, along with more advanced coping skills instruction, it is asserted, would help students keep away from the obvious charm interlinked with adolescent drinking and, as a result, would fundamentally reduce the excessive drinking behavior shown by adolescents in our country.
Teen Excessive Drinking: Conclusion
There are positively a number of justifiable reasons why so many of our teenagers drink in a destructive manner. Such a knotty problem demands a far-reaching and more applicable preventative and educational response by our parents, educators, politicians, and students so that our adolescents can learn how to cope with life’s predicaments in a more fruitful and accountable manner rather than gravitating to destructive drinking behavior to solve their problems.
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