Sergetalks Blog ~ The Official Blog of Serge LeClerc

Just to recap some of the statistics of the plague of alcohol upon our modern day society and our young people:

Alcohol usage or misuse and alcohol related deaths are the number one killer of that same age bracket;

What numerous people do not realize is that many, if not most of the 50,000 cases of alcohol poisoning in the United States each year do not result from alcohol addiction, but rather from instance of alcohol abuse. Indeed, binge drinking, a type of alcohol abuse, leads to perhaps the majority of alcohol overdose cases that are reported each year. Obviously, many people are not aware of this information or about alcohol facts such as these.

While underage drinking is a factor in nearly in nearly half of all teen automobile crashes, the leading cause of death among teenagers. (more…)

In my last chapter of my blog, I was speaking to the destructive influence of media, advertisements and violence, upon our teenagers. Let me explain how it is done.

Allow me to bring you back to a yesteryear – in your own life of growth and development. Let me fellows bring you to the Saturday evening bath, when after the water turned cold and you emerged wrinkled as a prune, you wiped the steam from the mirror to review yourself and your body from the previous week. And at the grand age of 13 years, you would stand there and bring your arms up in a pose, then flex those mighty biceps and upon close review, wonder when they would actually begin to grow larger than your sister’s? You would turn this way and that, looking closely at your upper lip to see if anything had sprouted during the previous week, check underneath your armpits for any growth, and check whether any pubic hairs had erupted in the movement towards manhood. You wondered whether your thighs would ever become larger than your knees. More importantly, you wondered as young boys do when one begins to move towards the next phase of developmental life cycle, whether you were smart enough, handsome enough, and manly enough – whether girls would like you, find you attractive, would you fit in with the other guys and would they find you cool. Would you be popular and successful…..would you be happy. (more…)

We ended the last blog with speaking about the societal changes begun in the mid-1960, the moral and ethical left-hand turn, the movement into ‘MEism’, which has set up the change of consequences for the choices that young people make today – and the foundation of comparative values to judge those choices against. They are faced with the exact same choices every young person has always faced; sex, alcohol, drugs, how to dress and how to view one’s identity. We reviewed the reality of today’s consequences in the arena of sex by looking at the startling increase in the number of teenagers having sexual transmitted diseases and more alarming, the increase and diversity of the STDs themselves. Then we looked at the numbers of crisis pregnancy rates, the proliferation of abortions and the proportion below the age of 17 yrs, and the interrelationship of those factors to the spike of teenage female rates which is the 2nd leading cause of death amongst our teens. (more…)

As we approach Christmas and a New Year, thought that I would begin to write over the next while about the Reality Facing Modern Day Youth and their Parents. Hope you join me weekly for each installment and please share the blog site with friends, co-workers and family.

I often hear parents say to their kids, “I know what you are going through, I was your age once.” Well quite frankly, that’s not quite correct as the times have change – the world is a much different place in say just 25 years – the pressures and challenges facing our young people are so vastly different from the society – and its fabric – we grew up in. Let me tell you how I know that – well simply by the stats:

Alcohol and alcohol related deaths are the number one killer of our young people. While we have the most informed and educated group of young people about alcohol – just from MADD and SADD and public health information for instance – we still have the heaviest drinking group of young people in the history of our country and province – 79% will have ‘binge drunk’ at least 3 times before they turn 17 years of age (drinking one drink directly after another until they pass out or are totally blasted) often resulting in serious biological, physical damage or death caused by ‘alcohol poisoning’. It is opinionated that very few, if any, young person in our society today will graduate from high school without being personally effected by the death of another young person caused by alcohol. (more…)