Preventing Youth Substance Abuse

Adolescent substance use can interfere with cognitive, emotional, and social development and may even affect later functioning in adult domains such as parenting and employment. The Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) recognized that this problem does not arise anew in adolescence, but in fact has roots in childhood. CSAP identified four critical predictors from childhood for substance use that could be valuable targets for prevention of adolescent substance use: parental management of and involvement with the child, and the child's social competence, self-regulation, and school achievement. In this book, the editors bring together a body of intervention research into a practical guide that shows how seven selected prevention programs address these risk factors.

After introducing the developmental and setting factors that affect risk for substance use, a general framework for translating this research into practice is provided. Chapters describing each intervention contain user-friendly explanations of the theoretical basis, intended population, methods and procedures, and critical implementation characteristics of each program and summarize how it was tested and shown to reduce risk for substance abuse. Illustrative case examples are woven throughout the text, showing the benefits gained from the approach.

The book is organized to describe interventions that apply to participants at differing developmental periods. Chapters include programs for universal or general population and for high risk youth and families. The included chapters cover programs developed and tested for a variety of ethnic and cultural groups across varying locations.