Youth Alcohol Abuse: A Significant Problem And The Need For Compelling Parenting And Leadership And Enhanced Student-Teacher And Parent-Child Relationships
Recent 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 alcoholism consultants emphasize the point that beer, wine, and liquor advertisements generated by the media are a major reason for the escalation of teen alcohol abuse.
Other alcohol addiction consultants believe that the increase in youth alcohol abuse is due to the toleration and ease of access of liquor, beer, and wine in our society.
Still other alcohol addiction consultants think that numerous teens engage in excessive drinking due to the increased apprehension that they go through.
From a somewhat different standpoint, due to the fact that both parents in quite a few families are gainfully employed, the lack of parental guidance indubitably has to play a significant role in the proliferation of youth alcohol abuse. And last but not least, different alcohol dependency professionals declare that the spread of teenage alcohol abuse is due, to some extent, to our permissive society.
Coping Skills and Excessive Drinking
One facet of youth alcohol abuse that seems to be under reported in the alcoholism research literature, on the other hand, is the lack of educational courses that teach teenagers how to upgrade their coping skills so that their injurious drinking behavior is fundamentally decreased or done away with.
Stated more explicitly, science has illustrated the fact that there is an indirect correlation between poor coping skills and hazardous drinking. Fundamentally, this means that the poorer the coping skills, the greater the frequency of alcohol abuse. To the degree that this is an accurate statement, why isn’t coping skills education a major part of the academic curriculum in all of our elementary schools, junior high schools, and high schools?
A Society That Accentuates Adolescent Coping Skills
Let us construct a scenario for the purpose of clarification. Let us imagine a society in which students are taught how to achieve good coping skills all the way from kindergarten up to and including their final year in high school.
In such a society, when life gets stressful, individuals who are ”coping skills experts” will be able to respond in a more healthy and more successful manner, contrary to others who are unsuccessful in their attempts to implement their coping skills.
Stated differently, students who exhibit good coping skills will be more able to think logically and show signs of first-class decision making as opposed to teens who, because they were unsuccessful in their attempts to develop quality coping skills, are drawn to the “quick fix” of abusive drinking, alcohol abuse, and teenage alcoholism.
What would happen in the above “ideal” society, furthermore, if young people not only got exceptional coping skills training but also got a first-rate education that stressed the short term and long term devastating costs associated with drug abuse and alcohol abuse? Emphasizing these types of drug and alcohol abuse facts, along with more advanced coping skills instruction, it is asserted, would help teenagers steer clear of the obvious appeal interlinked with teenage drinking and, for that reason, would fundamentally decrease the excessive drinking behavior demonstrated by the youth in our country.
Teen Risky Drinking: Room for Hope, Success, and Optimism and the Need for Strong Parenting and Leadership and Enhanced Relationships
There are clearly a number of convincing reasons why so many of our teenagers drink in a hazardous manner. Such a tricky issue, if hope, success, and optimism are to be achieved, demands an extensive and more meaningful preventative and educational response by our students, parents, politicians, and educators so that our teens can learn how to cope with life’s predicaments in a more fruitful and accountable way rather than gravitating to destructive drinking behavior to solve their problems. In sum, effective leadership and parenting and enhanced parent-child and student-teacher relationships are needed for such a knotty issue such as teen alcohol abuse.
