Avoiding Addiction: Educate and Protect Students
By Kriya Lendzion | May 2023
An increasingly addictive world pushes and pulls on today’s students in insidious ways, bombarding them with addictive media messages. Phone-synced watches allow children to be plugged in 24/7. With extensive time online, students encounter the normalization of addictive and destructive behaviors and social media dependence – a recipe for addiction. All children entering adolescence are at risk, with stronger habits formed in the early teen years than at any other age.
It is possible to fortify our students with information and skills to be resistant to the addictive forces within and outside them. Here’s what research and experts say works to reduce the likelihood of developing self-destructive relationships.
Provide science-based information
Use research-based information to help students understand why adolescent brains are especially prone to forming habits and why dopamine-exploding activities, such as drugs, video games, social media and porn, can be addictive. Use well-trusted surveys such as the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey or the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Monitoring the Future data to provide the statistics illustrating that most children actually aren’t using substances, and those who are use rarely. Infusing prevention education into classroom curriculum is imperative.
Use peer educators
Education about making responsible and healthy choices, anti-use and harm-reduction programming has been shown to be taken more seriously when delivered by same-aged or older peers. You can have an incredible impact by teaching a few students who are natural leaders and seen as role models how to spread the word among their fellow students. The students involved in designing and implementing this programming further benefit by building their leadership skills and more deeply soaking in their own lessons.
When it comes to prevention programs and knowledge, the earlier the better. Teaching our little ones about respecting their bodies and being conscientious of household chemicals, medicines, vitamins and unhealthy foods sets the foundation for steering them through the more complicated situations to come. Keep in mind that if they’re seeing it (e.g., drinking, smoking and phone use), we want to help them make healthy meaning of it before they form distorted beliefs on their own.
Partner with families
Many families are feeling scared, exhausted and overwhelmed from swimming upstream against our addictive culture. They’re hungry for the knowledge, tools and support to keep their children healthy and often are miseducated themselves on realities and risks. Provide guidance on how to have an open dialogue about addictive behaviors, how to set and maintain safeguards and boundaries around potentially risky behaviors, and how to respond effectively if they discover their child is making self-destructive choices.
Use educational interventions
Research shows that students are more likely to follow expectations and discipline policies when they are clearly communicated and consistently enforced. Your expertise can make a difference in helping design smarter and more effective consequences for policy violations. Interventions that are educational and supportive help students and guardians get the information and resources to address underlying causes of risky behavior and find better ways to meet students’ unmet needs. For example, Stanford’s Healthy Futures Alternative to Suspension Curriculum is an increasingly popular educational response to vaping violations.
Strengthen resistance skills
We need to help students build skills to realistically resist these forces while keeping their cool points and a sense of belonging. To do this, we need to ask them what these pressures actually look, sound and feel like. Responses will be different at various ages and settings and will change from year to year.
These capabilities are stronger the earlier we start building them. We can help even our littlest ones recognize and honor the feeling in their gut when something feels unsafe. We can teach them how to set boundaries with others, communicate assertively, report concerns about peers to an adult and explore how healthy friendships bring out our best. These lessons get them ready to handle increasingly risky and complicated situations later.
Since so much “peer pressure” is now coming from media, it’s essential to help our students disassemble and disempower those forces. Help them look behind the curtain of marketing tactics to hook people into using substances, junk foods, beauty products and porn. Nothing irritates teens more than feeling like they’re being manipulated and controlled. This media literacy can be woven into academic topics and health classes, and is a component of most comprehensive drug prevention curricula.
Explore and clarify personal goals and values
The clearer students are on what they believe, what they want for themselves and who they want to be, the more likely they are to sift every decision through that filter – who they befriend, whether they use substances, their responses to pressures and rules. Helping them clearly identify their personal goals and values is one of the most powerful preventive steps we can take. This exploration can be done as classroom instruction or individual appraisal and advisement or counseling activities. In individual counseling sessions, it gives you a powerful tool for intervening early in risky behaviors. Use your motivational interviewing skills to help students identify where their behaviors misalign with their beliefs and desires.
Help students meet their needs in healthy ways
By adolescence, students will grab what’s convenient and what works to meet their developmental needs for belonging, fun, confidence and coping, especially if they have a strong deficit in one of these areas. Then, once those brain connections fire, they wire. If vaping or self-harm works better than anything else to release or escape from uncomfortable feelings and it’s easily within reach, it can quickly become a dependency. If gaming is the only way some children feel excitement and a sense of competence, then it makes sense that they want to do it for hours instead of homework. Therefore, one of the most powerful ways we can help prevent children from developing addictive relationships is to guide them toward healthy alternatives for satisfying these needs. This is an all-hands-on-deck effort and includes using all of the resources and personnel at school – and the community – to create and guide students toward easily accessible activities and outlets.
Creating an addiction-proofing environment can feel like a tall order. School counselors can’t be solely responsible for designing and implementing it all. But, as the resident experts on all things academic, career and social/emotional, we are the keepers of the holistic big picture, the research and the data needed to educate administrators and the school community on what is needed. We are also chronically optimistic enough to believe it’s possible, and loud and persistent enough to not let anyone forget it.
Kriya Lendzion has been a school counselor, addiction and prevention specialist and consultant for more than 20 years. She’s currently an adolescent mental health and addiction therapist in Asheville, N.C. Connect with her on Instagram and Facebook @KriyaCounselor.
It is possible to fortify our students with information and skills to be resistant to the addictive forces within and outside them. Here’s what research and experts say works to reduce the likelihood of developing self-destructive relationships.
Provide science-based information
Use research-based information to help students understand why adolescent brains are especially prone to forming habits and why dopamine-exploding activities, such as drugs, video games, social media and porn, can be addictive. Use well-trusted surveys such as the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey or the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Monitoring the Future data to provide the statistics illustrating that most children actually aren’t using substances, and those who are use rarely. Infusing prevention education into classroom curriculum is imperative.
Use peer educators
Education about making responsible and healthy choices, anti-use and harm-reduction programming has been shown to be taken more seriously when delivered by same-aged or older peers. You can have an incredible impact by teaching a few students who are natural leaders and seen as role models how to spread the word among their fellow students. The students involved in designing and implementing this programming further benefit by building their leadership skills and more deeply soaking in their own lessons.
When it comes to prevention programs and knowledge, the earlier the better. Teaching our little ones about respecting their bodies and being conscientious of household chemicals, medicines, vitamins and unhealthy foods sets the foundation for steering them through the more complicated situations to come. Keep in mind that if they’re seeing it (e.g., drinking, smoking and phone use), we want to help them make healthy meaning of it before they form distorted beliefs on their own.
Partner with families
Many families are feeling scared, exhausted and overwhelmed from swimming upstream against our addictive culture. They’re hungry for the knowledge, tools and support to keep their children healthy and often are miseducated themselves on realities and risks. Provide guidance on how to have an open dialogue about addictive behaviors, how to set and maintain safeguards and boundaries around potentially risky behaviors, and how to respond effectively if they discover their child is making self-destructive choices.
Use educational interventions
Research shows that students are more likely to follow expectations and discipline policies when they are clearly communicated and consistently enforced. Your expertise can make a difference in helping design smarter and more effective consequences for policy violations. Interventions that are educational and supportive help students and guardians get the information and resources to address underlying causes of risky behavior and find better ways to meet students’ unmet needs. For example, Stanford’s Healthy Futures Alternative to Suspension Curriculum is an increasingly popular educational response to vaping violations.
Strengthen resistance skills
We need to help students build skills to realistically resist these forces while keeping their cool points and a sense of belonging. To do this, we need to ask them what these pressures actually look, sound and feel like. Responses will be different at various ages and settings and will change from year to year.
These capabilities are stronger the earlier we start building them. We can help even our littlest ones recognize and honor the feeling in their gut when something feels unsafe. We can teach them how to set boundaries with others, communicate assertively, report concerns about peers to an adult and explore how healthy friendships bring out our best. These lessons get them ready to handle increasingly risky and complicated situations later.
Since so much “peer pressure” is now coming from media, it’s essential to help our students disassemble and disempower those forces. Help them look behind the curtain of marketing tactics to hook people into using substances, junk foods, beauty products and porn. Nothing irritates teens more than feeling like they’re being manipulated and controlled. This media literacy can be woven into academic topics and health classes, and is a component of most comprehensive drug prevention curricula.
Explore and clarify personal goals and values
The clearer students are on what they believe, what they want for themselves and who they want to be, the more likely they are to sift every decision through that filter – who they befriend, whether they use substances, their responses to pressures and rules. Helping them clearly identify their personal goals and values is one of the most powerful preventive steps we can take. This exploration can be done as classroom instruction or individual appraisal and advisement or counseling activities. In individual counseling sessions, it gives you a powerful tool for intervening early in risky behaviors. Use your motivational interviewing skills to help students identify where their behaviors misalign with their beliefs and desires.
Help students meet their needs in healthy ways
By adolescence, students will grab what’s convenient and what works to meet their developmental needs for belonging, fun, confidence and coping, especially if they have a strong deficit in one of these areas. Then, once those brain connections fire, they wire. If vaping or self-harm works better than anything else to release or escape from uncomfortable feelings and it’s easily within reach, it can quickly become a dependency. If gaming is the only way some children feel excitement and a sense of competence, then it makes sense that they want to do it for hours instead of homework. Therefore, one of the most powerful ways we can help prevent children from developing addictive relationships is to guide them toward healthy alternatives for satisfying these needs. This is an all-hands-on-deck effort and includes using all of the resources and personnel at school – and the community – to create and guide students toward easily accessible activities and outlets.
Creating an addiction-proofing environment can feel like a tall order. School counselors can’t be solely responsible for designing and implementing it all. But, as the resident experts on all things academic, career and social/emotional, we are the keepers of the holistic big picture, the research and the data needed to educate administrators and the school community on what is needed. We are also chronically optimistic enough to believe it’s possible, and loud and persistent enough to not let anyone forget it.
Kriya Lendzion has been a school counselor, addiction and prevention specialist and consultant for more than 20 years. She’s currently an adolescent mental health and addiction therapist in Asheville, N.C. Connect with her on Instagram and Facebook @KriyaCounselor.