Alcohol and children

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

The history of human consumption of substances that alter consciousness has more than one millennium. Among them, the most common are alcoholic beverages. Many peoples have developed alcoholic traditions - unwritten laws that establish when you can and should drink. Alcohol is able to change a person's state of mind, give him a feeling of calm, relaxation, comfort, eliminate the restraining principle, etc. According to researchers, alcoholic beverages are consumed by more than 90% of the adult population of most highly developed countries, they abuse much less - from 20 to 40% (according to various sources), and suffers from alcoholism on average 4 - 5%.

Alcohol and children, it is possible to distinguish two conditional models of a person's acquaintance with the "green serpent". This is happening much earlier than we think.

First model

Very often, a child is faced with alcohol already at the age of 5-10, when for the first time he begins to understand that adults, and therefore people who are authoritative for him, use a drink that he (until he has become an adult) is prohibited from drinking. Moreover, this drink (the child still does not differentiate it either in quality or quantity) is used on the most solemn occasions: birthdays, holidays, and first of all the New Year, as well as when especially sad events occur. Throughout its development, the child, through adults, gains the experience of dealing with alcohol. He sees that alcohol relaxes, liberates, makes adults cheerful and sociable, helps relieve stress and tension. Positive properties of action alcohol and children fix and remember. This model can be attributed to the traditions of cultural drinking maintained in society.

Second model

- a tougher and more compulsory introduction to alcohol - the following story may become.

Every holiday, and they were often in this family, the father poured a glass of vodka for his 5-year-old son and gave him a drink. The child was surprised by the reaction of the guests, and he liked to be in the center of attention, and everything else was perceived as a natural process (as if it should be so). Thus, from the very childhood, the ritual of using such a respected and revered product was formed. In families of cultural drinkers, the process of "nurturing" future alcoholics is no less intensive than in families who drink a lot, often and drunkenly. It is here: here it is a beautiful, solemn, furnished ritual of use alcohol and children see it. This further leads to the formation of a stable positive dominant in the child for the use of alcoholic beverages.

Gradually, a person gets used to the idea that if you need to relax or relieve stress, there is only one way - alcohol. If you need to meet a girl or enter into an intimate relationship, there is also only one sure way - alcohol. And how not to drink alcohol in a company? After all, you will be a black sheep. Moreover, drunkenness is also the simplest, most primitive way of obtaining imaginary, illusory reserves of adaptive energy. Unable to cope with the difficult task of bringing reality into line with their views on the nature of things, a weak, susceptible, suspicious person finds exactly this easily accessible path to false calmness. And for a short time alcohol undoubtedly relieves intellectual and nervous tension. As Jack London wrote: "He gives the body a false power, the spirit - a false ascent, and everything around makes it seem incomparably more beautiful than it really is." But the price for this disservice is truly double.