Vol.2 Issue: 2 - Building Resilience

Nearly every week, I address forums for parishes and civic groups on the subject of what practical steps we can take to minimize the chances of young people getting involved in abusive drug-taking. One group is constantly missing from such meetings; the parents of pre-teenage, primary school children. I can well understand how difficult it is for them to get to such meetings; kids to be washed, fed, and minded at the end of a busy day, so as to go and talk about a subject which is hardly uplifting. Not a very attractive prospect. So I can sympathise with Mums and Dads feeling that they'd rather give it a miss.

But what is far more worrying is such parents thinking that 'drugs aren't yet my problem'. Many educators feed back to us at Mary of the Cross that too many parents of primary students think that there's no necessity for them to turn their attention to the issue yet, because their children aren't at a drug-taking age. When those children reach adolescence, and the problem of their being exposed to the drug market is real and present, is when many parents decide that the matter needs to be dealt with.

Sorry, but this is very flawed thinking. Far and away the best means of maximizing the chance of a given young person not getting involved in substance abuse is by giving them a sense of resilience (I like to use the term 'inner armoury'). This aims to provide the inherent capacity to resist the temptation to use drugs when the moment arrives in their teenage years - as it inevitably will - when they are exposed to the drug market.

However, building this resilience is neither a certain nor a quick process. By the time adolescence comes around, most of a young person's fundamental attitudes will already be in place. It remains possible to change individual decisions, but by adolescence, the battle to build that inner resilience will essentially have been either won or lost. That's why we have to start dealing with issues such as a child's sense of belonging, self-worth, identity, and capacity for rational decision-making, in their pre-adolescent phase.

Giving teenagers information that shows drugs are harmful to them will never be sufficient to ensure that they don't get involved in substance abuse. That threat of harm needs to be personalized and prioritized; in other words, each individual young person needs to develop their own consciousness that the avoidance of self-harm is a problem for them, and is of central importance to their lives. Persuading young people to do this is no easy task. We shouldn't be surprised that this is so; after all, we've all known about how lethal smoking is for at least the last three decades, yet people are still taking it up.

However, if individual parents and educators don't start laying the groundwork at an early stage, then a difficult task becomes an all but impossible one. As Matt McDonald's article in the last At The Cross shows, the Catholic Education Office clearly recognizes this, and great steps are being taken to ensure that resilience-building is a component of the Catholic primary curriculum. But, as in every other aspect of life, parents are the best educators. They know, inherently, that their pre-teenage children will become vulnerable teenagers all too quickly. Let's hope we can convince increasing numbers of them to think out resilience-building strategies within their families whilst they can still achieve maximum impact. Parents, like their children, need to be convinced that this issue belongs to them.

Peter Hansen