"People seem to be more upset about kids' smoking than their drinking. Drinking is seen as a rite of passage. Many don't see the link between drinking and trauma and injury or other negative consequences." (p.382)
Do you agree? Disagree? Have your thoughts changed after reading the book?
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3 comments:
Well I totally agree with this statement. So many adults, parents, whoever have convinced themselves to think that smoking will give you cancer and that is worse then anything. Drinking is seen as something that "everyone" experiments with. Everyone drinks before a Friday night football game in high school or everyone drinks when they pass their difficult final in college. The parents think that this is ok. Why not, so and so had a huge test and he/she needs to blow off steam. Or it's homecoming, what do I expect?
I have had many friends get grounded for significant longer periods of time because their parents found cigarettes in their room. Some only have got a scolding when coming home wasted. The reality is both are not good for you. But both need to be treated with the same severity then.
I have a more general comment ... I think many parents tend to ignore dangerous or inappropriate behaviors by their kids. Are we afraid of our kids? Do we worry that they won't like us? Are we concerned they will be socially excluded? Are we so busy worrying about their popularity and "resume" for college that we don't have time to address bad behavior? Are we all about relativism and therefore ignore what our kids do because we know so many other kids doing worse things than ours? Are we just worn out? Parenting has always been tough, but perhaps never tougher than in the culture we live in. As parents, we need to do some soul searching and come to grips with what our real objectives are as parents. And then, we need get ready to do some very tough work.
As adults, social drinking is more accepted today than smoking and it appears that "acceptance" has swelled to include the young adult community. As parents it's our responsibility to protect our kids. The bottom line is until our teenagers reach their 20's their brains are still developing and alcohol, pot etc. can alter that brain development and for some, the consequences are tragic. For me, that trumps many justifications such as "everyone's doing it”, it's not as bad as other kids" or “they're going to drink somewhere, might as well be here". Teenage drinking and drug use is a slippery slope; one I wish more chose to avoid.
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