Youth Alcohol Abuse: A Crucial Problem

Recent alcohol abuse statistics demonstrate the fact that alcohol abuse among teens is increasing in the United States. What are some of the reasons for this? Quite a few alcohol addiction professionals assert that wine, beer, and liquor ads created by the media are a fundamental reason for the escalation of teen alcohol abuse.

Other alcohol abuse specialists claim that the increase in adolescent alcohol abuse is due to the acceptability and accessibility of beer, wine, and liquor in our society.

Still other alcoholism experts declare that many of our teens involve themselves in destructive drinking because of the increased fretfulness that they go through.

From a somewhat different standpoint, due to the fact that both parents in more than a few families work, the lack of parental supervision certainly has to play a fundamental part in the increase in teenage alcohol abuse. And as a final point, different chemical dependency specialists claim that the rise in teenage alcohol abuse is due, at least partially, to our lenient society.

Coping Skills Education and Alcohol Abuse

One aspect of teenage alcohol abuse that looks as if it poorly reported in the alcohol addiction research results, however, is the dearth of educational courses that teach students how to enhance their coping skills so that their abusive drinking behavior is drastically lessened or exterminated.

Stated more explicitly, science has displayed the fact that there is an indirect correlation between poor coping skills and hazardous drinking. For all intents and purposes, this means that the more mediocre the coping skills, the higher the occurrence of alcohol abuse. To the extent that this is an accurate affirmation, why isn’t coping skills instruction a key part of the educational curriculum in all of our high schools, junior high schools, and elementary schools?

A Society That Emphasizes Youth Coping Skills

Let us manufacture a scenario for explanatory purposes. Let us imagine a society in which all people are trained how to develop sound coping skills all the way from kindergarten up to and including their senior year in high school.

In such a society, when life gets difficult, people who are “coping skills masters” will be able to respond in a more healthy and more rewarding manner, as opposed to others who fail to put their coping skills into action.

More to the point, students who display high-quality coping skills will be more able to think clearly and engage in top-shelf decision making as opposed to teens who, because they were unsuccessful in their attempts to develop top-of-the-line coping skills, resort to the “quick fix” of hazardous drinking.

What would happen in the above “ideal” society, furthermore, if teenagers not only obtained top shelf coping skills training but also obtained an extraordinary education that focused on the long term and short term injurious outcomes associated with drug abuse and alcohol abuse? Emphasizing these types of drug and alcohol abuse facts, along with more highly developed coping skills training, it is emphasized, would help students keep away from the noticeable appeal correlated with youth drinking and, accordingly, would radically reduce the abusive drinking behavior shown by the youth in our country.

Teenage Excessive Drinking: Conclusion

There are positively many legitimate reasons why so many of our teenagers drink in an abusive manner. Such a complex problem demands a wide-ranging and more pertinent preventative and educational response by our educators, politicians, parents, and students so that our teens can learn how to cope with life’s predicaments in a more productive and responsible way instead of resorting to alcohol abuse to solve their problems.