Teen Alcohol Abuse: A Serious Problem

Alcohol abuse statistics demonstrate the fact that alcohol abuse among adolescents is increasing in the United States. What are some of the reasons for this? Quite a few alcohol dependency professionals state that beer, liquor, and wine advertisements produced by the media are a primary reason for the increase in teen alcohol abuse.

Other alcohol abuse professionals stress the point that the increase in teen alcohol abuse is due to the acceptability and ease of access of liquor, beer, and wine in our society.

Still other alcohol abuse authorities state that numerous adolescents engage in abusive drinking due to the increased disquiet that they live through.

From a slightly different viewpoint, because both parents in a number of families work full or part-time, the lack of parental supervision definitely has to play a fundamental role in the proliferation of teenage alcohol abuse. And last of all, a variety of substance abuse experts think that the expansion of teenage alcohol abuse is due, to some extent, to our permissive society.

Hazardous Drinking and Coping Skills Education

One element of adolescent alcohol abuse that looks as if it lacking in the chemical dependency research results, on the other hand, is the absence of educational programs that teach students how to upgrade their coping skills so that their harmful drinking behavior is fundamentally lessened or gotten rid of.

Stated differently, scientific research has revealed that there is an indirect link between poor coping skills and abusive drinking. In actual fact, this means that the worse the coping skills, the higher the rate of alcohol abuse. To the degree that this is a correct allegation , why isn’t coping skills education an important part of the academic curriculum in all of our high schools, junior high schools, and elementary schools?

A Society That Stresses Youth Coping Skills

Let us construct a scenario for descriptive purposes. Let us imagine a society in which all people are trained how to achieve superior coping skills all the way from kindergarten up to and including the twelfth grade.

In such a society, when life gets demanding, people who are “coping skills masters” will be able to respond in a more healthy and more productive way, contrary to others who are unsuccessful in their attempts to apply their coping skills.

More specifically, students who show evidence of sound coping skills will be more able to think logically and show signs of first-class decision making as opposed to students who, because they lack outstanding coping skills, are attracted to the “quick fix” of abusive drinking.

What would happen in the above “ideal” society, moreover, if teens not only got exclusive coping skills education but also received an outstanding education that focused on the short term and long term injurious results 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 pronounced, would help teenagers keep away from the obvious appeal related to adolescent drinking and, therefore, would radically lessen the injurious drinking behavior shown by adolescents in our country.

Adolescent Alcohol Abuse: Conclusion

There are without a doubt many defensible reasons why so many of our adolescents drink in an injurious manner. Such a thorny problem demands an extensive and more meaningful preventative and educational response by our parents, politicians, students, and educators so that our teens can learn how to cope with life’s difficulties in a more productive and accountable manner instead of gravitating to risky drinking behavior to solve their problems.

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