Teenage drinking
I read with interest the recent reports about the rise of teenage binge drinking in this country. It seems to finally have come to our attention that we have a huge alcohol problem in this country. Not a day goes by without a shocking story of a 15 year-old admitted to hospital with alcohol poisoning or teenagers out of control on booze, the general public are horrified and I’m sure believe it’s not their adolescent.
The truth is we have succeeded in creating a culture that condones, encourages and mostly normalizes what is abnormal drinking. We have done this over the last 30 years or so, visit any town centre in the country over the weekend and you will see adults falling out of bars into the gutter in the quest of a ‘good time’. How can we be so surprised that are young people are copying this behavior? Young people want to be like adults, from when a little girl tries on Mummy’s high heels to having their first sneaky drags on a cigarette; they are trying to be cool, grown-up, just like us. They see what we do and want to copy it. Our culture has formed the belief that you can’t have a good time without getting drunk, that you drink in order to get p****d, that this is normal and harmless (the general public is still of the opinion that only smelly old men on benches have drink problems) we have passed this faulty belief onto our children and now we are surprised. Lots of suggestions have been made as to how to rectify this problem, there was a big debate that the change in licensing laws would inflict more damage, raising the drinking age has been considered, Alcohol Concern (the independent advisory body on alcohol) have even suggested that parents giving alcohol to under 15’s should be prosecuted. However all of these solutions seem to be wide of the mark, surely what we need to address is what’s underneath the problem, what’s driving the behavior, the way our culture thinks and relates to alcohol. Tackling are nations drink problem means a cultural shift that needs to start with the younger generation, we need to educate young people not on units and ’safe drinking’ (a complete failure if you look at the results we’re getting) and educate them on emotional intelligence, how to deal with stress, how to deal with failure, how to understand how they feel so they aren’t driven to use alcohol and other substances to cope with their feelings.
As a therapist I treat many successful individuals whose lives are falling apart because they have never been offered any guidance on how to deal with their emotional lives, they have turned to alcohol for fun, pleasure and finally to cope.
This is the behavior we are role modeling to our young people. They’re just doing what we’re doing.
The solution must start with looking at ourselves.
April 26th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
What worries me is the role models these young people have, they regularly see celebrities pictured in the papers being legless, even our young princes have one too many. What example is set at home by their parents and older siblings? You are doing a great job to try and change the culture of binge drinking before it destroys their lives.