Back
when I was in middle school, the big slogan in drug education was 'just
say no'. Given all the drinking and smoking that I witnessed taking
place in high school, I posit that this slogan came up a little short.
In hindsight, suggesting to teenagers- those most susceptible to peer
pressure, always worrying about fitting in, and hyper-sensitive to
public ridicule- that they could avoid drugs by a strategy of 'just say
no' would be like an anti-poverty program advising the poor to 'just
have more money'.
A better approach might be to encourage kids to
avoid tempting situations. That won't solve the problem, of course, but
it is harder to give the wrong answer if you avoid hearing the question.
I'm
watching the NCAA tournament, college basketball's annual postseason
tournament, as I type this sentence (1). I'm reminded of just how many
players who come from tough backgrounds credit their immersion into
basketball for 'keeping them off the streets'. What they mean by
'streets' in a general sense is difficult situations (though sometimes
that does literally include the streets they grew up on). These athletes
avoided career-derailing mistakes by using their passion for sport to
avoid the places where mistakes were most commonly made.
Ideally,
kids would avoid drugs and alcohol until they built up the willpower to
define their own limits and make healthy decisions for their bodies.
But how to do this best is a difficult question. For me- and let me
remind you here, reader, that I have no expertise on the matter- the
best approach is to focus on avoiding bad situations over finding the
right answers to bad questions.
With this approach, a kid could
frame his bad decisions as an error- 'that was a dumb decision to go to
that party in the woods with those potheads'- instead of as a character
flaw- 'I am too mentally weak to say no'. Again, I could be wrong on
this as I am only speaking from experience. But for me, fixing what I
consider my bad decision making comes a lot easier than changing what I
see as ingrained personality defects.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. No, seriously!
Breaking news: I type without looking at the keyboard.
Also, my apologies for the long lag time in posts. Luckily, there is no news on the blog, ever, but I expect at some point the lag will have an unforeseen yet inexcusable negative impact on something I set to publish a month or two in the future.
