The article on Teenage Drug Abuse-Surviving Teenage Drug Abuse by Juliana Breckinridge seeks to give reasons on why some teenagers decide to engage in drug abuse. It also seeks to highlight the challenges that parents of such children go through in trying to make them stop the habit and some of the strategies that they can employ to successfully accomplish this. The article also gives some of the reasons why it is not easy for parents to achieve this mainly because they have to raise their children in a world where drugs are highly available and they can be accessed easily. This paper seeks to give reasons why this article cannot be used for academic purposes mainly because the author makes a bad argument by use of a poor rhetoric.
On several occasions throughout the article, the author has used poor rhetoric in an effort to pass information. The author explains that finding out that a child uses drugs could be catastrophic for a parent. This rhetoric is aimed at convincing people of the high level of predicament that parents find themselves courtesy of this revelation. However, equating this to a catastrophe is exaggerating the actual gravity of the issue. The author also says that parents should know that they are not responsible for their teenagers’ drug use. This is another instance of poor use of rhetoric since parents contribute indirectly to these addiction problems. The author also talks of how parents find difficulties in raising drug free children (Breckinridge, 2009). This is a false assumption since it may give people the reason to free themselves from the blame when their children succumb to drugs.
A number of logical fallacies have also been used in expressing the author’s thoughts towards the issue of drugs. For instance, she says that such children will recover faster when they if they are allowed to talk to third parties (Breckinridge, 2009). By doing this, she automatically assumes that the family cannot help much even though they know this person better and they were the first people to establish that he has a problem. The problem cannot go away simply because a third person was involved. The author also says that parents should know that they are not the only ones facing the situation. This is misguided since the problems may be similar but the experience is different for every parent.
Generally, this article cannot be used for academic purposes due to some of the imprudent perceptions that the author has used in expressing his thoughts. The tone convinces the readers that this is just but a small problem. On the other hand, the logical fallacies are rarely backed up by facts from research. The author also uses pathos to bring some form of relief to parents going through by excluding them from the causes of the problem and somewhat convincing them that third party will solve the problem better.
References
Breckinridge, J. (2009). Teenage Drug Abuse - Surviving Teenage Drug Abuse - Drug Abuse Articles - ArticleDoctor.com. Articledoctor.com. Retrieved 8 May 2016, from http://www.articledoctor.com/drug-abuse/teenage-drug-abuse---surviving-teenage-drug-abuse-2509
