…You are doing something right.
Though the numbers of teenagers engaging in risky behavior remains alarmingly high, public health officials are increasingly cheered by the trend.
They cite a variety of reasons for it, including slick commercials that educate teens on the consequences of drugs and cigarettes and sex.
There’s also the possibility that today’s hyper-busy children – raised by peripatetic parents – have no time to waste.
Perhaps the most hopeful reason is one embedded in the generation gap between today’s teens and today’s parents, those party-children of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
When they were young, today’s parents engaged in precisely the same kinds of risky behavior available to their children, to the dismay of their own parents, and despite plenty of unheeded calls to reform.
Perhaps because of their own hard, dangerous lessons, and because of their exposure to all the messages that didn’t work, today’s parents have an easier time doing something their folks found difficult: getting their children to listen.