CASAColumbia.org: News Room: New CASA Report Finds Adolescent Substance Use at Epidemic Levels.
The study looks at how American culture increases the risk that teens will use addictive substances and how the messages sent by adults, and glamorized by the tobacco and alcohol industries and the media, normalize substance use and undermine the health and futures of our teens.
DadOnFire 
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August 7, 2011 at 11:29 am
susan lea
I read some of the reports and aricles on this website for CASA and it’s troubling that so many of our teens are abusing drugs. I also saw that there were articles about the importance of eating dinner as a family. And there was a study showing the negative affects of parents enabling drug abuse in their children by not taking it seriously when they discover drinking and smoking cigarettes.
There is no question that the attitudes of parents and recognition of problems before they get out of control is extremely important. But we also have to look at the statistics and ask ourselves if we’re being realistic in our expectations of parenting in the U.S.
A 2009 report on Moms in the U.S. showed that 57 percent of women with infants worked outside the home. There were 757,616 child care centers in the U.S. And there were more than 10 million single moms with children under 18 years old. Only 58 percent of mothers with children under 6 had breakfast with their kids.
We don’t live in a “Leave it to Beaver” kind of world anymore. Working single mothers are in a tough situation that is, usually, not their choice. If fathers aren’t willing to step up to the plate and be more involved as parents, the burden of overseeing teen behavior is too much for one person. And if the communities and schools aren’t willing to design programs that will help single parent families, where the parents are working long hours, then the statistics on early drug use are not likely to improve. Our kids deserve communities where they aren’t left on their own every afternoon while Mom is at work until 6 or 7 or 8 in the evening.