Originally inspired by her personal journey through teen addiction, Kriya Lendzion is now a veteran School Counselor, fiercely dedicated to helping educators prevent and intervene early in students’ addictive and self-destructive behaviors. She brings her expertise as a Licensed Clinical Addiction Specialist, Certified Prevention Specialist, and Adolescent Therapist to schools across the world, serving as a curriculum designer, drug and alcohol educator, professional development trainer, and consultant. Kriya resides in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina, and loves traveling the globe to help youth thrive.
Our students are growing up in an increasingly addictive world, often unaware of how they’re being shaped by it, like fish swimming in water. The good news is that prevention research shows that schools can be a strong force for addiction prevention and early intervention, overpowering the strongest of risk factors.
Our Addictive World
Students are constantly bombarded by addictive media messages claiming the keys to happiness and confidence are found externally—in sugary foods, material possessions, drugs, or screens. According to Common Sense Media in 2021, more than half of kids have cell phones by age 11, one in five by age 8, and teen screen time is averaging over 8 hours a day. This constant engagement is being linked to declining abilities to delay gratification, self-entertain, sustain attention and tolerate distress.
Children’s daily landscapes include an all-time high of drug references and advertisements speaking directly to their values and interests and online access to harmful content from hyper-sexualized material to instructions for self-harming. These exposures intensify during adolescence when their molding-clay brains hardwire learning and feel-good experiences into long-term connections. Combined with increased stress, anxiety, and a lack of coping skills, the result is a recipe for addiction.
Addictive options are expanding and intensifying Today’s “substances” including drugs, alcohol, social media, gambling, video games, and porn are becoming increasingly accessible, providing stronger dopamine “hits,” and easier to conceal for our kids, making them even more addictive. Disordered eating and self-harm are on the rise for youth worldwide, and treatment centers are emerging to address technology and gaming addictions.
They’re All “At-Risk” While certain factors increase a child’s susceptibility to addiction—such as genetics, trauma, chronic stress, or impulsivity—adolescents are naturally ALL at risk. By puberty, their extra-reactive threat alarms, added stress hormones, and reproductive hormone bursts can create a steady sense of overwhelm they yearn to escape. Meanwhile, anything that works to provide this distress relief, or meet their other natural adolescent needs for belonging, fun, identity, and confidence wires connections in the brain, forming habits stronger than at any other time in their lives.
Addiction-Proofing
Fortunately, we can fortify students with skills and information to resist these internal and external addictive forces. Here’s what’s been shown to work in preventing self-destructive relationships with anything.
Provide comprehensive, science-based Information. Unfounded scare tactics no longer work; students can easily fact-check online. Instead, provide evidence-based information on how substances and activities can be problematic for adolescents’ physical, cognitive, and mental health. Speak to their values, guiding them to examine how these risks conflict with their own goals and beliefs. Educate them on the neuroscience of addiction, including genetic predisposition, and why their malleable brains are particularly prone to habit forming.
With behaviors they are most likely to engage in, students need “harm reduction” strategies that promote self-awareness and responsibility to help them avoid harming themselves (or others).
This content will absorb more deeply when it is seamlessly interwoven into everyday curriculum and discussions versus being relegated just to “health” or “Physical Education” class, or School Counselor delivery. System-wide infusion also communicates a focus on and commitment to student wellness as a school cultural norm.
Use Peer Educators. Students are the best experts on school culture and the most influential forces in shifting it. Involving them in focus groups, designing programming, and implementing healthy choices (like screen self-checks) creates a powerful peer-led impact. Enlisting well-respected students from diverse social groups ensures broader reach. Peer educators not only impact others but also benefit from this leadership experience and deeper learning.
Start early. Prevention begins with young children learning respect for how they treat their bodies and maintain boundaries for themselves. We want to help children disassemble confusing messages, and make healthy sense of what they are exposed to – such as drinking, smoking or phone use – before they develop any distorted beliefs about them.
Partner with parents. Many parents are scared, exhausted, and overwhelmed from swimming upstream in today’s addictive culture and appreciate knowledge and tools to help keep their children healthy and safe. Provide resources and programs that educate guardians on how to talk about risky behaviors with their kids, set appropriate guidelines, and respond artfully to self-destructive choices.
School policy. Whether about cell phones or substances, policies are more impactful when framed as based not just liability, but care and evidence, and communicated as such: “This rule exists to protect you from things proven to be harmful because we really care about you.” Punitive responses aiming to cause discomfort or embarrassment backfire and fail to address or shift underlying causes of risky behavior, so design interventions that are educational and supportive, helping students and families get the information and resources they need to make better choices.
Strengthen resistance skills. Disempower problematic peer, media and family influences on our students by engaging them (at all ages) in critical reflection and conversation about these forces. Media literacy education is impactful for adolescents who naturally resent being controlled and manipulated. Guide them in examining drugs, screen use, body image, risky social media “challenges,” and hypersexual media through the lenses of the hypocrisies, financial agendas, and devious tactics companies use to gain wealth at the expense of young people.
Students also need concrete skills to navigate real-world pressures while maintaining their sense of belonging. Through the everyday infusion of social-emotional learning, we can help them strengthen assertiveness and boundary-setting skills, recognize unhealthy and risky situations, and know when and how to report concerns.
School Connectedness. Research reveals that school connectedness – a sense of being known, cared about, and valued by the school community – can potentially overpower any risk factor a child carries into our classroom. Consider how students can be more involved on campus through facilities improvement, peer mentoring or inclusion in programming creation and orchestration, soliciting those who aren’t naturally rising as leaders. Create opportunities for students to know each other and be known by you personally, and make a point to recognize their strengths, tough days and express interest in their lives. One single trusted adult relationship at school is a proven protective factor, so assure that every child has someone fostering that connection whether it’s a coach or a bus driver.
Support Healthy Alternatives. Students will naturally reach for what is most convenient and works best to meet their developmental needs for belonging, fun, confidence, and coping. Therefore the key to helping them avoid addictive relationships with any substance or behavior as a misguided strategy is to assist them in developing healthy and fulfilling alternatives.
This presents evidence-based rationale for allotting time and resources to social-emotional learning, relationship-building, and low student-to-counselor ratios in kindergarten through 12th grades. And inspires every adult on campus to use their role to guide kids toward coping tools, opportunities for relationship-building, extracurricular activities and outlets, and community resources.
All-hands-on-deck. Addiction-proofing our students is an all-hands-on-deck effort, requiring not only inter-departmental collaboration, but partnership with families, organizations, and members of our unique communities. The celebrated “Icelandic Prevention Model” is a strong example for us to emulate, demonstrating the power to prevent youth substance use and other self-destructive behaviors when all sectors of a community, including schools, collaborate to bring young people meaningful activities and commit to their thriving.