Alcohol abuse statistics show that alcohol abuse among teens is increasing in the United States. What are some of the reasons for this? More than a few alcohol abuse consultants believe that wine, beer, and liquor ads brought into being by the media are a significant reason for the proliferation of teen alcohol abuse.

Other alcohol addiction consultants argue that the increase in adolescent alcohol abuse is due to the acceptability and convenience of wine,liquor, and beer in our society.

Still other alcohol addiction professionals emphasize the point that many of our young people engage in dangerous drinking because of the increased disquiet that they live through.

From a somewhat different perspective, due to the fact that both parents in more than a few families work full or part-time, the lack of parental supervision clearly has to play a key role in the escalation of teen alcohol abuse. And lastly, an assortment of alcohol addiction authorities think that the expansion of adolescent alcohol abuse is due, at some level, to our permissive society.

Coping Skills and Excessive Drinking

One component of adolescent alcohol abuse that looks like it is poorly reported in the alcoholism research literature, nonetheless, is the paucity of educational courses that teach adolescents how to augment their coping skills so that their harmful drinking behavior is substantially reduced or exterminated.

Stated another way, scientific research has displayed the fact that there is an indirect connection between poor coping skills and abusive drinking. In actual fact, this means that the more mediocre the coping skills, the higher the frequency of alcohol abuse. To the degree that this is a correct contention, why isn’t coping skills instruction a fundamental part of the educational core curriculum in all of our elementary schools, junior high schools, and high schools?

A Society That Emphasizes Adolescent Coping Skills

Let us create a scenario for explanatory purposes. Let us imagine a society in which students are taught how to achieve 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 stressful, people who are “coping skills masters” will be able to respond in a healthier and more creative way, contrary to others who fail to put their coping skills into practice.

Stated more precisely, students who display first rate coping skills will be more able to think clearly and engage in excellent decision making as opposed to teens who, because they lack quality coping skills, resort to the “quick fix” of excessive drinking.

What would happen in the above “ideal” society, what’s more, if young people not only got extraordinary coping skills education but also received a first class education that underscored the long term and short term unhealthy outcomes associated with drug abuse and alcohol abuse? Such an emphasis on drug and alcohol abuse facts, along with more highly developed coping skills training, it is declared, would help teenagers stay away from the obvious charm related to underage drinking and, as a consequence, would significantly diminish the destructive drinking behavior shown by teenagers in our country.

Youth Hazardous Drinking: Conclusion

There are indubitably numerous well thought-out reasons why so many of our teenagers drink in an injurious manner. Such a thorny problem demands an extensive and relevant educational and preventative response by our students, educators, politicians, and parents so that our teens can learn how to cope with life’s problems in a more fruitful and accountable manner rather than resorting to alcohol abuse to solve their problems.