Alcohol
In 1993, one out of three high school seniors, one out of four tenth-graders, and one out of seven eighth-graders got drunk at least once every two weeks. Where are so many children learning to abuse alcohol?
The 1982 report of the Surgeon General revealed that alcohol is the most consumed beverage on prime time television shows. Television characters drink alcohol twice as often as they drink tea or coffee, 14 times as frequently as soft drinks, and 15 times more often than water. Eighty percent of prime-time programs showed or mentioned alcohol consumption, and in half of these instances it was heavy alcohol consumption - five or more drinks. In 1990, there were 8.1 drinking references or portrayals per hour on prime-time. Of deep concern to the Surgeon General, “The drinkers are not the villains or the bit players; they are good, steady, likable characters,” and portrayals are entirely devoid of “indications of possible risks.” When we consider that, in addition to alcohol consumption portrayed during programs, the average U.S. citizen also sees 100,000 television advertisements for alcoholic beverages before age twenty-one, it seems reasonable to suspect that TV exposure might affect our children’s drinking habits.
New Zealand researchers in fact discovered a direct correlation between frequency of television viewing among thirteen to fifteen year olds and quantity of alcohol consumed at age eighteen. The more TV young teens watched, the more alcohol they drank three to five years later. Researchers from the University of Rochester School of Medicine in New York replicated the New Zealand findings with a random sampling of fourteen- to sixteen-year-old U.S. teens. A follow-up study concluded that it was the TV watching that produced the alcohol consumption (and not the alcohol consumption that encouraged TV watching).
A team at Stanford University recently succeeded in quantifying television’s effect on teenage drinking. Studying over 1,500 ninth-grade public high school students in San Jose, California, the Stanford researchers discovered that “one extra hour of television viewing per day was associated with an average 9% increase in the risk of starting to drink over the next eighteen months; [and] similarly, one extra hour of music video [MTV] viewing per day was associated with an average 31% increase in the risk of starting to drink over the next eighteen months.” These probabilities remained even after controlling for the effects of age, sex, ethnicity, and other media use. The Stanford team concluded:
The findings of this study have important health and public policy implications… The large magnitudes of these associations between hours of television viewing and music video viewing and the subsequent onset of drinking demand that attempts to prevent adolescent alcohol abuse should address the adverse influences of alcohol use in the media.
Each year, students spend $5.5 billion on alcohol - more than they spend on soft drinks, tea, milk, juice, coffee, and books combined. Alcohol is implicated in more than 40% of all academic problems and 28% of all dropouts. Alcohol was found to be a factor in 60% of women who were diagnosed with certain infectious diseases. On a typical weekend in America, an average of one teenager dies every two hours in a car crash involving alcohol. Children who drink recreationally are 7.5 times more likely to use any illicit drug and 50 times more likely to use cocaine than children who abstain from alcohol. In light of these statistics, we must consider whether we want our children to absorb TV’s messages about alcohol consumption or whether there is something more productive they could do with their time.
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