THE PARENT'S JOB

Study: Life Itself Can Cause Problems For Teens

Columbia University's National Center on Addiction says its annual study of
American children and parents identified boredom, stress and extra money as
pathways to substance abuse for young people. Why does this sound so
intuitively wrong? Could it be that it's time to stop spending money on surveys
that seem to miss the point completely and only add more murk to subject matter
that is already murky enough?

Judging from the results, the way to raise children in America is to keep them
abjectly poor (25 uncommitted dollars a week seems to be the danger point),
occupied in mundane tasks and, essentially, isolated from the realities of
life, which are inherently stress-producing.

Locking teenagers in the basement and forcing them to work on needlepoint and
craft projects, for example, with the only payment being three hots and a cot,
may sound progressive to the people at Columbia, but in the American heartland,
we find a pocket moderately full of earned jack, some free time to spend it in,
a handful of good friends and a little healthy stress is the recipe for a
perfect adolescence.

Parents might look to their own life experience as predictive for their
children's behaviors. If you spent your teen years wrapped around a bong, for
instance, it might be prudent to watch for that behavior in your children, have
a genuine, thoughtful conversation with them, and move quickly to address the
problem. The same holds true for alcohol and tobacco, both frightfully damaging
to young people and worthy of all the concern and response we can muster.

What obviously has little value is to ask children every day whether they have
the red-flagged $25.40 in their pocket, are too bored and feel so much stress
that they find the only adequate alternative is to smoke, drink or use other
drugs. It is also better, Columbia reported, to go to a nice little high school
instead of a huge high school. Students at schools with more than 1,200
students are twice as likely to abuse substances as those attending schools
with fewer than 800 students.

And there you have it, the formula for well-adjusted, substance-free teenagers.

Keep them totally busy, totally broke, privately educated and, quite
mysteriously, totally happy.

That's totally not going to happen, of course.

Drug and alcohol abuse, much experience indicates, doesn't generally involve a
snap decision that flows from boredom, prosperity or too much stress. These are
behaviors that shift from the experimental to the gradual to the profoundly
involved state over a period of time. But even as they snake along their
course, for the children who are most likely to face big substance problems
over time, they present clues.

The parent's job is not to ponder whether it was too much cash or too much
stress or boredom (the perpetual condition and complaint of most teenagers)
that caused the problem. It is to know how to watch for substance abuse
problems and to know how to respond to them.