Teenage Alcohol Abuse: A Significant Problem

Recent alcohol abuse statistics show that alcohol abuse among teenagers is increasing in the United States. What are some of the reasons for this? Quite a few alcohol addiction specialists claim that wine, liquor, and beer advertisements generated by the media are a major reason for the increase in teen alcohol abuse.

Other chemical dependency authorities think that the increase in teen alcohol abuse is due to the acceptability and accessibility of liquor, beer, and wine in our society.

Still other alcoholism experts assert that more than a few of our teenagers get involved in harmful drinking due to the increased fretfulness that they live through.

From a slightly different standpoint, due to the fact that both parents in a number of families work, the lack of parental guidance definitely has to play a significant part in the increase in youth alcohol abuse. And last of all, different alcoholism authorities emphasize the point that the expansion of teen alcohol abuse is due, to some extent, to our permissive society.

Excessive Drinking and Coping Skills Education

One component of adolescent alcohol abuse that looks as if it somewhat incomplete in the alcohol addiction research literature, nevertheless, is the scarcity of educational courses that teach adolescents how to improve upon their coping skills so that their injurious drinking behavior is radically decreased or gotten rid of.

More precisely, science has demonstrated that there is an indirect relationship between poor coping skills and abusive drinking. Fundamentally, this means that the more mediocre the coping skills, the greater the occurrence of alcohol abuse. To the extent that this is an accurate affirmation, why isn’t coping skills training an essential part of the educational prospectus in all of our high schools, junior high schools, and elementary schools?

A Society That Puts Emphasis On Youth Coping Skills

Let us construct a scenario for descriptive purposes. Let us imagine a society in which students are taught how to achieve solid 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, individuals who are “coping skills masters” will be able to respond in a more healthy and more productive manner, as opposed to others who are unsuccessful in their attempts to put their coping skills into action.

Stated differently, students who reveal superior coping skills will be more able to think clearly and display first-class decision making as opposed to students who, because they failed to obtain outstanding coping skills, are attracted to the “quick fix” of abusive drinking.

What would happen in the above “ideal” society, what’s more, if young people not only got first-rate coping skills training but also obtained an excellent education that focused on the long term and short term negative 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 emphasized, would help adolescents steer clear of the noticeable attraction with teen drinking and, consequently, would drastically diminish the dangerous drinking behavior shown by teens in our country.

Teen Abusive Drinking: Conclusion

There are positively many legitimate reasons why so many of our teens drink in a dangerous manner. Such a complex predicament demands a broad based and more applicable educational and preventative response by our politicians, parents, educators, and students so that our youth can learn how to cope with life’s difficulties in a more fruitful and accountable way rather than gravitating to destructive drinking behavior to solve their difficulties.