Drug and alcohol addiction and abuse. Recognition. Prevention. Treatment

20/20 Parenting. Recognizing and mitigating early vulnerabilities and risk factors.

Teenager: 13 - 19+

Parenting your Teen into Young Adulthood

While this can be a difficult time for your teen, every child is an individual and some seem to sail through adolescence and young adulthood easily. This can depend on the strength of the family and community as well as the strength of the child, emotionally, physically, mentally,* and spiritually.

The scary reality is that our children's world is quite different from the world we grew up in. Drug and alcohol use has become normalized for them. They see it modeled in our movie industry, in their peers and music, and even by many of we adults. Habitually we reach for pain killers, tobacco, alcohol, or coffee to cope with our stressors rather than dealing with the underlying cause and using healthier coping strategies. Unfortunately, "monkey see, monkey do" often holds true.

Furthermore, adolescents see our societal hypocrisies, often times using them as an excuse for ignoring the dangers. For example, though it is well known that tobacco causes lung cancer, it is a legal drug. Additionally, when they see others using without apparent harm they think we are lying or exaggerating the dangers.

Then there are the drugs themselves, more readily available, and stronger than ever. To know how to protect themselves from laced drugs and drinks and how to resist peer pressure requires a broad range of skills and internal strengths. They need your skillful guidance now perhaps more than ever before.

To that end the following articles will assist you in handling the prevention challenges of adolescence and early adulthood, not only for substance abuse but for the vulnerabilities that lead to susceptibility to substance abuse.

*Please also visit "Potential Vulnerabilities" in the left menu for health information on the many, often confused and misunderstood, childhood 'mental' conditions.