Over-protection can make children 'addiction prone'

Children today are more addiction prone than previous generations because they are overly protected by parents, an American psychologist…

Children today are more addiction prone than previous generations because they are overly protected by parents, an American psychologist has claimed.

Dr Stanton Peele at Trinity College Dublin last night said the best thing parents could do to try and protect their children from addiction was to try and raise them to be independent and well adjusted. "Children are more addiction prone because they are less well prepared for being independent self-sustaining human beings," he said.

"Children are so managed now that they just don't develop the competence or self-sufficiency and self-management, and there is nothing more prone to make you addictive.

"Over-protectiveness has become the menu du jour, certainly in the United States, and we feel we are doing the best for our kids by over-protecting them," he added, "but staged practice at independence is the single best concept for helping your children mature in general and for protecting them from addiction."

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Dr Peele also claimed the best way to prevent children from becoming addicted to alcohol was to introduce them to it gradually at home. He said there was no point in just telling them not to drink, because they would ignore that.

Furthermore he said consideration should not be given to raising the legal drinking age to 21, as in the US. He said it did not stop most young people there drinking before they reached that age.

This contradicts the thinking of another US expert, Prof David Schaffer, a child and adolescent psychiatry specialist at Columbia University, who said last month that Ireland should consider raising the legal drinking age from 18 to 21 in an effort to reduce suicide rates. He said when the age was raised in the US, the number of accidents and suicides went down.