Parental Influence

FACTORS CONTRIBUTING TO ALCOHOL AND DRUG USE
Parental influence and family backgrounds play a vigorous role of paramount importance in socializing children. According to Dawson & Grant (1998) children of alcoholics are at high risk for developing problems with alcohol and other drugs; they often do poorly at school, live with pervasive tension and stress, have high levels of anxiety and depression and experience coping problems. Apparently, children sometimes grow up in these families with the understanding that such “behavior” is normal.For instance; if one has a parent with an alcohol and drug use disorder greatly increases the chances that an individual will develop one at some point in their life and this individual will live to know that

Although peers may be an important coping mechanism during this transitional period, the increase of peer involvement in a student’s everyday life may influence the increase of peer pressure as well. This is because peers can encourage one another to engage in activities they or they may not like such as alcohol and drug use. Age or rank mates act as influential models in introducing new lifestyles to their age mates and they can even put each other under pressurized risky behaviors. By modeling these behaviors to their peers, college students are viewing alcohol use as a positive and socially acceptable experience (Kinard& Webster, 2011). The social identity theory may help to explain why college students are influenced by peer pressure (Regan & Morrison, 2011). In college, for a student to be recognized they have to belong to an in-group so as to socially accept and those who belong to the out-group are those who do not drink and are not recognized. Therefore, to be recognized a student goes through a transitional change, such as drinking alcohol and using drugs which is socially acceptable by the in-group to fit

The respondents comprised female and male youths aged 14 - 24 and the signal was that peer pressure contributes to young people drinking, smoking, and using drugs. Furthermore, the Health and Wellness Centre at the University of Botswana conducted a segmentation study identifying nine population groups on campus of which three were focused upon for programme development. One of these was the so-called ‘party boys’ who reported influencing each other in drinking more frequently and having more drunk sex than the average University of Botswana student (Health and Wellness Centre, 2006).
According to Edlin, Golanty& Brown (2000) stress is one of the factors that drive people to indulge in alcohol and drug use as a coping mechanism. Furthermore, they state that students binge drink for two major reasons to relieve academic stress and to reduce social anxiety. The same authors continues on to say that preparing for exams and writing papers can be intense highly stressful experiences and when they are over it is natural to want to reward oneself for simply “surviving” and to “blow off” the accumulated tension students also binge their drinks to lessen their nervousness in party