Limit Screen Time Research
TV time 'does not breed badly behaved children'
Spending hours watching TV or playing computer games each day does not harm young children's social development, say experts.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) team who studied more than 11,000 primary school pupils says it is wrong to link bad behaviour to TV viewing.
Although researchers found a small correlation between the two, they say other influences, such as parenting styles, most probably explain the link.
But they still say "limit screen time".
This cautionary advice is because spending lots of time in front of the TV every day might reduce how much time a child spends doing other important activities such as playing with friends and doing homework, they say.
US research suggests watching TV in early childhood can cause attention problems at the …show more content…
age of seven.
We found no effect with screen time for most of the behavioural and social problems that we looked at and only a very small effect indeed for conduct problems, such as fighting or bullying”
Dr Alison ParkesLead investigator
In the US, paediatric guidelines recommend that total screen time should be limited to less than two hours of educational, non-violent programmes per day. There are currently no formal guidelines in the UK.
For the MRC study, published in Archives of Diseases in Childhood, Dr Alison Parkes and colleagues asked UK mothers from all walks of life to give details about their child's TV viewing habits and general behaviour.
Electronic entertainment
Almost two-thirds (65%) of the 11,014 five-year-olds included in the study watched TV between one and three hours a day, 15% watched more than three hours and less than 2% watched no television at all.
Watching more than three hours' TV a day at this age predicted a very small increase in "conduct" problems at the age of seven.
After their seventh birthday, these boys and girls were slightly more likely to get into fights, tell lies or be bullies than their peers, according to their mothers' reports.
Time spent playing computer games bore no such relationship.
And there was no association between TV or any screen time and other issues such as hyperactivity or problems interacting with friends.
Dr Parkes, head of the MRC's social and public health sciences unit in Glasgow, said it was wrong to blame social problems on TV.
"We found no effect with screen time for most of the behavioural and social problems that we looked at and only a very small effect indeed for conduct problems, such as fighting or bullying.
"Our work suggests that limiting the amount of time children spend in front of the TV is, in itself, unlikely to improve psychosocial adjustment."
She said interventions focusing on the family dynamic and the child were more likely to make a difference and that much may depend on what children are watching and whether they were supervised.
Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology, at the London School of Economics, said the findings were a "good reason to ask why some children spend so much time watching television".
Prof Annette Karmiloff-Smith, of Birkbeck, University of London, said that rather than focusing on the possible adverse effects of TV and video games, it would be better to look at what positive impact they could have on children.
Prof Hugh Perry, chair of the MRC's neurosciences and mental health board, said: "We are living in a world that is increasingly dominated by electronic entertainment, and parents are understandably concerned about the impact this might be having on their children's wellbeing and mental health.
"This important study suggests the relationship between TV and video games and health is complex and influenced by many other social and environmental factors."
In Texas, a Pregnant Teen Sues Her Parents to Avoid an Abortion
Earlier this month, Jaime Burnside called an attorney in Texas to help her teen-age son. His girlfriend was pregnant and wanted to have the baby, but her parents wanted her to have an abortion.
It’s the kind of case that invigorates the Texas Center for Defense of Life, which has handled three similar situations in the two years since it was founded. “Parents think they’re making a decision for their daughters like pulling a tooth or getting their tonsils out,” says Stephen Casey, who spoke to the boy’s mother and agreed to file suit against the girl’s parents. “But now that the girl is pregnant, the parents become grandparents and they can’t make a decision for the girl about her unborn child.”
A judge in Houston agreed. Last week, the parents of the 16-year-old girl — identified as R.E.K. in the lawsuit — said they would comply with an injunction that prohibits them from forcing their daughter to end her pregnancy. According to the lawsuit, the divorced parents also agreed to let the girl continue to use her cell phone and drive her car, both of which apparently had been confiscated after she announced that she was pregnant.
The girl’s mom tried to talk her daughter into an abortion, saying she would be “making the biggest mistake of her life” if she had the baby, and the girl’s father texted her that she “needs an ass whoopin’,” according to the lawsuit. The girls’ parents have said the allegations are not true. The parents’ attorney could not be reached.
The situation is unspooling not long after Texas cut funds for family-planning services. Nor does the state provide comprehensive sex education in schools, preferring to emphasize abstinence. “We know teens have sex so it would be nice to prepare them to make good decisions,” says Elizabeth Nash, who tracks states’ reproductive rights legislation for the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research group. “Being a teen mother is a very hard road to hoe.”
Burnside can attest to that first-hand. When she was 15, she got pregnant with Evan Madison, the 16-year-old father-to-be in the case. Last month, R.E.K. took apregnancy test at Burnside’s home to confirm she was expecting. The positive result left Burnside dumbfounded. “One of the first things Evan said to me was, You can’t get mad. You had me when you were a teenager,” says Burnside, 33, who works at the local sheriff’s office. “I said I wasn’t mad, but it changes everything.”
Burnside dropped out of school and got her GED, then went to college. She held down two jobs. “You have to work a lot harder,” she says. “You have another human being depending on you. They are not going to understand the magnitude until they’re living it.”
The baby is due Sept. 16. According to Evan, he and R.E.K. — they began dating last summer — knew right away they would have the baby. “We’ve always been against abortion,” says Evan, who wants to become a welder (R.E.K. wants to attend nursing school). “As soon as we found out she was pregnant, we knew we wanted to keep it.”
Contrary to the impression that most teens choose abortion, most girls under 18 who get pregnant choose to stay pregnant: 57% of these pregnancies result in babies compared to 29% that end in abortion (miscarriages account for the rest). But just as support for reproductive rights varies widely across the nation, so too do the preferences of teen girls. In Texas, for example, 72% continue their pregnancies while just 12% end them. In California, on the other hand, 50% choose birth compared to 36% who opt for abortion.
Texas is one of just three states, in addition to Oklahoma and Virginia, that requires notarized parental consent for a daughter under 18 to have an abortion. But even in those states, girls can bypass their parents’ wishes, according to a Guttmacher summary, which notes:
“Moreover, because the Supreme Court has ruled that states may not give parents an absolute veto over their daughter’s decision to have an abortion, most state parental involvement requirements include a judicial bypass procedure that allows a minor to receive court approval for an abortion without her parents’ knowledge or consent.”
Yet there are no clear rules in a situation like R.E.K.’s. Girls can try to reason with their parents, but ultimately, both sides may end up facing off in a courtroom. “Roe v. Wade goes both ways,” says Greg Terra, president of the Texas center, “and choice goes both ways. A few of these situations can resolve without filing suit. But even though a girl has a legal right to keep her child, parents don’t necessarily care about the law.”
The situation unspooling in Texas is “very unusual,” says Nash. “If you’re supportive of the right to choose, it is her right to become a parent or not to become a parent. At the same time, this is an incredibly big responsibility that she is undertaking, and her parents will be undertaking it along with her. So this is a very tough situation.”
It remains to be seen just how involved the girl’s parents will be with their new grandchild. While Burnside and her husband, who is not Evan’s biological father, are being supportive, the girl’s parents may find it harder to play a role: days after the judge’s ruling, Evan, a high school sophomore, married his pregnant girlfriend, a junior, in what Burnside calls a “shotgun” wedding. The expectant couple moved into Burnside’s home, where Evan is raising a cow for the upcoming county fair.
There wasn’t much time to plan any wedding festivities, but in a month or so, the newlyweds plan to host a crawfish boil to celebrate.
Motivation, Not IQ, Matters Most for Learning New Math Skills
You don’t have to be born with math skills; solving problems is a matter of studying and motivation.
That may not seem like such a surprise, but it’s become easy to say ‘I just can’t do math.’ While some element of math achievement may be linked to natural inborn intelligence, when it comes to developing skills during high school, motivation and math study habits are much more important than IQ, according to a new study.
“It’s not how smart we are; it’s how motivated we are and how effectively we study that determines growth in math achievement over time,” says Kou Murayama, a post-doctoral psychology researcher at University of California Los Angeles and lead author of the study published in the journal Child Development.
Murayama and his colleagues studied math achievement among roughly 3,500 public school students living in the German state of Bavariain. The German students were tracked from the fifth grade through the tenth grade and given an annual (grade-appropriate) standardized math exam every year. The kids were also given an IQ test, and asked about their attitudes toward math.
In particular, the psychologists were interested in how much the adolescents believed that math achievement was something within their control, and whether the kids were interested in math for its own sake. They also asked the students about study strategies, such as whether they would try to link concepts together when learning new material, or simply try to memorize the steps to typical problems.
To their surprise, the researches found that IQ does not predict new learning — in other words, intelligence as measured by the IQ test does not indicate how likely students are to pick up new concepts or accumulate new skills. While children with higher IQs did have higher test scores from the beginning of the study, how muchnew material the kids learned over the years was not related to how smart they were, at least not once demographic factors were taken into account.
“Students with high IQ have high math achievement and students with low IQ have low math achievement,” Murayama says. “But IQ does not predict any growth in math achievement. It determines the starting point.”
So the children who improved in math over the years were disproportionately those who said they “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with statements such as, “When doing math, the harder I try, the better I perform,” or “I invest a lot of effort in math, because I am interested in the subject”– even if they had not started out as high-achieving students. In contrast, kids who said they were motivated purely by the desire to get good grades saw no greater improvement over the average. As for study strategies, those who said they tried to forge connections between mathematical ideas typically improved faster than kids who employed more cursory rote-learning techniques.
While not entirely surprising — it makes sense that more motivated students would do better and that those who put in more effort to learn would see better results — the findings provide reassuring confirmation that academic success is not governed by a student’s cognitive abilities alone. Instead, students who want to learn math and who work at it may find they make faster gains and learn better than students who are bright but less motivated.
That’s encouraging not just for students, but for schools as well, says Murayama. He notes that it’s not clear how generalizable the results from the German school system are to other nations, but he is intrigued enough by the results to investigate different instructional styles that teachers and parents may use to inspire kids to learn. While certain intelligence traits seem to be based in genetics and and therefore hard to change, previous research suggests that motivation is not innate, but largely learned. Even, it seems, when it comes to math.
College Drinking: Maybe Not a Disorder but Still a Big Problem
GETTY IMAGES STOCK
Proposed changes to the psychiatric profession’s diagnostic manual, the DSM-5, have caused a recent uproar, with critics worried that the new label of “alcohol abuse disorder” will overdiagnose young problem drinkers — as many as 40% of college students — who eventually outgrow their dysfunctional behavior. Editors of the DSM-5 countered that the change in definition won’t increase diagnosis, but the whole debate is merely a sideshow. As a member of Harvard University’s Alcohol and Other Drug Services Executive Committee, I know firsthand that drinking among young adults is still a very serious problem that needs treatment.
Whether or not problem drinkers become alcoholics later in life — and there’s evidence that many of them do — we can’t ignore the hard reality that college binge drinking plays a central role in campus deaths, sexual assaults, physical injuries, destruction of property, failing academic performance, unintended pregnancies, STDs, depression, domestic violence and other mental-health problems.
The statistics are truly sobering. Every year, more than 3 million students between ages 18 and 24 drive while drunk. Alcohol accounts for 1,850 annual deaths in that age group, including deaths from car crashes and suicide. Almost 600,000 are injured under the influence of alcohol and another 700,000 have been assaulted by an intoxicated student. Around 400,000 had unprotected sex as a result of intoxication and 100,000 reported being too drunk to give consent for sex. Eleven percent of college drinkers damaged property. A quarter report academic difficulty due to alcohol use, while 150,000 college students have alcohol-related health problems.
Some of these alarming trends have shown significant increases over the 14 years since the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism began tracking college drinking and its consequences. And these numbers are painfully animated by recent high-profile cases such as the murder of the University of Virginia lacrosse player by her alcohol-abusing ex-boyfriend or the death by alcohol hazing of a Cornell sophomore.
This level of dysfunction alone should provide the cold shower we need where college binge drinking is concerned. Imagine the outcry if prescription drugs or marijuana use caused anywhere near this degree of mayhem. But when it comes to problem drinking, we view the world through rose-colored shot glasses, preferring images of tailgates and graduation parties, not rapes and suicides.
As to the issue of addiction, the picture gets worse.
There’s a clear link between early drinking and a higher lifetime risk of alcoholism, with each earlier year of drinking resulting in greater risk: 47% of people who started drinking at age 14 became alcohol dependent later in life, while only 9% of those who began drinking after age 21 became dependent.
Studies suggest that two factors may be at work. On the one hand, early drinking is often an indicator of an underlying propensity to alcoholism. In other words, people who are genetically or otherwise predisposed to alcoholism — or show traits, like impulsivity, that can contribute to alcoholism — are more likely to want to start drinking sooner than later. This makes intuitive sense.
But it may be that the act of early drinking itself could raise the risk of alcoholism even in people who have no family history of alcoholism or are in other ways no likelier than the later drinkers to become alcoholics. This line of research suggests that the early identification of problem drinking in young people — and the willingness to label it as a problem — may be critical to forestalling alcoholism in later
life.
Critics worry that the revised definition will stigmatize young people who meet the criteria for an alcohol disorder — routinely consuming four or five drinks rapidly in a short period of time or blacking out, for example — but who modify their drinking habits in their 20s. The fear is that the more expansive clinical label will force them into rigid treatment models or might even encourage self-fulfilling behavior.
But why are we getting bogged down in debates about diagnostic labels when the real issue is how to reduce harm? Drunk by any other name is still drunk.
Spending hours watching TV or playing computer games each day does not harm young children's social development, say experts.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) team who studied more than 11,000 primary school pupils says it is wrong to link bad behaviour to TV viewing.
Although researchers found a small correlation between the two, they say other influences, such as parenting styles, most probably explain the link.
But they still say "limit screen time".
This cautionary advice is because spending lots of time in front of the TV every day might reduce how much time a child spends doing other important activities such as playing with friends and doing homework, they say.
US research suggests watching TV in early childhood can cause attention problems at the …show more content…
age of seven.
We found no effect with screen time for most of the behavioural and social problems that we looked at and only a very small effect indeed for conduct problems, such as fighting or bullying”
Dr Alison ParkesLead investigator
In the US, paediatric guidelines recommend that total screen time should be limited to less than two hours of educational, non-violent programmes per day. There are currently no formal guidelines in the UK.
For the MRC study, published in Archives of Diseases in Childhood, Dr Alison Parkes and colleagues asked UK mothers from all walks of life to give details about their child's TV viewing habits and general behaviour.
Electronic entertainment
Almost two-thirds (65%) of the 11,014 five-year-olds included in the study watched TV between one and three hours a day, 15% watched more than three hours and less than 2% watched no television at all.
Watching more than three hours' TV a day at this age predicted a very small increase in "conduct" problems at the age of seven.
After their seventh birthday, these boys and girls were slightly more likely to get into fights, tell lies or be bullies than their peers, according to their mothers' reports.
Time spent playing computer games bore no such relationship.
And there was no association between TV or any screen time and other issues such as hyperactivity or problems interacting with friends.
Dr Parkes, head of the MRC's social and public health sciences unit in Glasgow, said it was wrong to blame social problems on TV.
"We found no effect with screen time for most of the behavioural and social problems that we looked at and only a very small effect indeed for conduct problems, such as fighting or bullying.
"Our work suggests that limiting the amount of time children spend in front of the TV is, in itself, unlikely to improve psychosocial adjustment."
She said interventions focusing on the family dynamic and the child were more likely to make a difference and that much may depend on what children are watching and whether they were supervised.
Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology, at the London School of Economics, said the findings were a "good reason to ask why some children spend so much time watching television".
Prof Annette Karmiloff-Smith, of Birkbeck, University of London, said that rather than focusing on the possible adverse effects of TV and video games, it would be better to look at what positive impact they could have on children.
Prof Hugh Perry, chair of the MRC's neurosciences and mental health board, said: "We are living in a world that is increasingly dominated by electronic entertainment, and parents are understandably concerned about the impact this might be having on their children's wellbeing and mental health.
"This important study suggests the relationship between TV and video games and health is complex and influenced by many other social and environmental factors."
In Texas, a Pregnant Teen Sues Her Parents to Avoid an Abortion
Earlier this month, Jaime Burnside called an attorney in Texas to help her teen-age son. His girlfriend was pregnant and wanted to have the baby, but her parents wanted her to have an abortion.
It’s the kind of case that invigorates the Texas Center for Defense of Life, which has handled three similar situations in the two years since it was founded. “Parents think they’re making a decision for their daughters like pulling a tooth or getting their tonsils out,” says Stephen Casey, who spoke to the boy’s mother and agreed to file suit against the girl’s parents. “But now that the girl is pregnant, the parents become grandparents and they can’t make a decision for the girl about her unborn child.”
A judge in Houston agreed. Last week, the parents of the 16-year-old girl — identified as R.E.K. in the lawsuit — said they would comply with an injunction that prohibits them from forcing their daughter to end her pregnancy. According to the lawsuit, the divorced parents also agreed to let the girl continue to use her cell phone and drive her car, both of which apparently had been confiscated after she announced that she was pregnant.
The girl’s mom tried to talk her daughter into an abortion, saying she would be “making the biggest mistake of her life” if she had the baby, and the girl’s father texted her that she “needs an ass whoopin’,” according to the lawsuit. The girls’ parents have said the allegations are not true. The parents’ attorney could not be reached.
The situation is unspooling not long after Texas cut funds for family-planning services. Nor does the state provide comprehensive sex education in schools, preferring to emphasize abstinence. “We know teens have sex so it would be nice to prepare them to make good decisions,” says Elizabeth Nash, who tracks states’ reproductive rights legislation for the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research group. “Being a teen mother is a very hard road to hoe.”
Burnside can attest to that first-hand. When she was 15, she got pregnant with Evan Madison, the 16-year-old father-to-be in the case. Last month, R.E.K. took apregnancy test at Burnside’s home to confirm she was expecting. The positive result left Burnside dumbfounded. “One of the first things Evan said to me was, You can’t get mad. You had me when you were a teenager,” says Burnside, 33, who works at the local sheriff’s office. “I said I wasn’t mad, but it changes everything.”
Burnside dropped out of school and got her GED, then went to college. She held down two jobs. “You have to work a lot harder,” she says. “You have another human being depending on you. They are not going to understand the magnitude until they’re living it.”
The baby is due Sept. 16. According to Evan, he and R.E.K. — they began dating last summer — knew right away they would have the baby. “We’ve always been against abortion,” says Evan, who wants to become a welder (R.E.K. wants to attend nursing school). “As soon as we found out she was pregnant, we knew we wanted to keep it.”
Contrary to the impression that most teens choose abortion, most girls under 18 who get pregnant choose to stay pregnant: 57% of these pregnancies result in babies compared to 29% that end in abortion (miscarriages account for the rest). But just as support for reproductive rights varies widely across the nation, so too do the preferences of teen girls. In Texas, for example, 72% continue their pregnancies while just 12% end them. In California, on the other hand, 50% choose birth compared to 36% who opt for abortion.
Texas is one of just three states, in addition to Oklahoma and Virginia, that requires notarized parental consent for a daughter under 18 to have an abortion. But even in those states, girls can bypass their parents’ wishes, according to a Guttmacher summary, which notes:
“Moreover, because the Supreme Court has ruled that states may not give parents an absolute veto over their daughter’s decision to have an abortion, most state parental involvement requirements include a judicial bypass procedure that allows a minor to receive court approval for an abortion without her parents’ knowledge or consent.”
Yet there are no clear rules in a situation like R.E.K.’s. Girls can try to reason with their parents, but ultimately, both sides may end up facing off in a courtroom. “Roe v. Wade goes both ways,” says Greg Terra, president of the Texas center, “and choice goes both ways. A few of these situations can resolve without filing suit. But even though a girl has a legal right to keep her child, parents don’t necessarily care about the law.”
The situation unspooling in Texas is “very unusual,” says Nash. “If you’re supportive of the right to choose, it is her right to become a parent or not to become a parent. At the same time, this is an incredibly big responsibility that she is undertaking, and her parents will be undertaking it along with her. So this is a very tough situation.”
It remains to be seen just how involved the girl’s parents will be with their new grandchild. While Burnside and her husband, who is not Evan’s biological father, are being supportive, the girl’s parents may find it harder to play a role: days after the judge’s ruling, Evan, a high school sophomore, married his pregnant girlfriend, a junior, in what Burnside calls a “shotgun” wedding. The expectant couple moved into Burnside’s home, where Evan is raising a cow for the upcoming county fair.
There wasn’t much time to plan any wedding festivities, but in a month or so, the newlyweds plan to host a crawfish boil to celebrate.
Motivation, Not IQ, Matters Most for Learning New Math Skills
You don’t have to be born with math skills; solving problems is a matter of studying and motivation.
That may not seem like such a surprise, but it’s become easy to say ‘I just can’t do math.’ While some element of math achievement may be linked to natural inborn intelligence, when it comes to developing skills during high school, motivation and math study habits are much more important than IQ, according to a new study.
“It’s not how smart we are; it’s how motivated we are and how effectively we study that determines growth in math achievement over time,” says Kou Murayama, a post-doctoral psychology researcher at University of California Los Angeles and lead author of the study published in the journal Child Development.
Murayama and his colleagues studied math achievement among roughly 3,500 public school students living in the German state of Bavariain. The German students were tracked from the fifth grade through the tenth grade and given an annual (grade-appropriate) standardized math exam every year. The kids were also given an IQ test, and asked about their attitudes toward math.
In particular, the psychologists were interested in how much the adolescents believed that math achievement was something within their control, and whether the kids were interested in math for its own sake. They also asked the students about study strategies, such as whether they would try to link concepts together when learning new material, or simply try to memorize the steps to typical problems.
To their surprise, the researches found that IQ does not predict new learning — in other words, intelligence as measured by the IQ test does not indicate how likely students are to pick up new concepts or accumulate new skills. While children with higher IQs did have higher test scores from the beginning of the study, how muchnew material the kids learned over the years was not related to how smart they were, at least not once demographic factors were taken into account.
“Students with high IQ have high math achievement and students with low IQ have low math achievement,” Murayama says. “But IQ does not predict any growth in math achievement. It determines the starting point.”
So the children who improved in math over the years were disproportionately those who said they “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with statements such as, “When doing math, the harder I try, the better I perform,” or “I invest a lot of effort in math, because I am interested in the subject”– even if they had not started out as high-achieving students. In contrast, kids who said they were motivated purely by the desire to get good grades saw no greater improvement over the average. As for study strategies, those who said they tried to forge connections between mathematical ideas typically improved faster than kids who employed more cursory rote-learning techniques.
While not entirely surprising — it makes sense that more motivated students would do better and that those who put in more effort to learn would see better results — the findings provide reassuring confirmation that academic success is not governed by a student’s cognitive abilities alone. Instead, students who want to learn math and who work at it may find they make faster gains and learn better than students who are bright but less motivated.
That’s encouraging not just for students, but for schools as well, says Murayama. He notes that it’s not clear how generalizable the results from the German school system are to other nations, but he is intrigued enough by the results to investigate different instructional styles that teachers and parents may use to inspire kids to learn. While certain intelligence traits seem to be based in genetics and and therefore hard to change, previous research suggests that motivation is not innate, but largely learned. Even, it seems, when it comes to math.
College Drinking: Maybe Not a Disorder but Still a Big Problem
GETTY IMAGES STOCK
Proposed changes to the psychiatric profession’s diagnostic manual, the DSM-5, have caused a recent uproar, with critics worried that the new label of “alcohol abuse disorder” will overdiagnose young problem drinkers — as many as 40% of college students — who eventually outgrow their dysfunctional behavior. Editors of the DSM-5 countered that the change in definition won’t increase diagnosis, but the whole debate is merely a sideshow. As a member of Harvard University’s Alcohol and Other Drug Services Executive Committee, I know firsthand that drinking among young adults is still a very serious problem that needs treatment.
Whether or not problem drinkers become alcoholics later in life — and there’s evidence that many of them do — we can’t ignore the hard reality that college binge drinking plays a central role in campus deaths, sexual assaults, physical injuries, destruction of property, failing academic performance, unintended pregnancies, STDs, depression, domestic violence and other mental-health problems.
The statistics are truly sobering. Every year, more than 3 million students between ages 18 and 24 drive while drunk. Alcohol accounts for 1,850 annual deaths in that age group, including deaths from car crashes and suicide. Almost 600,000 are injured under the influence of alcohol and another 700,000 have been assaulted by an intoxicated student. Around 400,000 had unprotected sex as a result of intoxication and 100,000 reported being too drunk to give consent for sex. Eleven percent of college drinkers damaged property. A quarter report academic difficulty due to alcohol use, while 150,000 college students have alcohol-related health problems.
Some of these alarming trends have shown significant increases over the 14 years since the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism began tracking college drinking and its consequences. And these numbers are painfully animated by recent high-profile cases such as the murder of the University of Virginia lacrosse player by her alcohol-abusing ex-boyfriend or the death by alcohol hazing of a Cornell sophomore.
This level of dysfunction alone should provide the cold shower we need where college binge drinking is concerned. Imagine the outcry if prescription drugs or marijuana use caused anywhere near this degree of mayhem. But when it comes to problem drinking, we view the world through rose-colored shot glasses, preferring images of tailgates and graduation parties, not rapes and suicides.
As to the issue of addiction, the picture gets worse.
There’s a clear link between early drinking and a higher lifetime risk of alcoholism, with each earlier year of drinking resulting in greater risk: 47% of people who started drinking at age 14 became alcohol dependent later in life, while only 9% of those who began drinking after age 21 became dependent.
Studies suggest that two factors may be at work. On the one hand, early drinking is often an indicator of an underlying propensity to alcoholism. In other words, people who are genetically or otherwise predisposed to alcoholism — or show traits, like impulsivity, that can contribute to alcoholism — are more likely to want to start drinking sooner than later. This makes intuitive sense.
But it may be that the act of early drinking itself could raise the risk of alcoholism even in people who have no family history of alcoholism or are in other ways no likelier than the later drinkers to become alcoholics. This line of research suggests that the early identification of problem drinking in young people — and the willingness to label it as a problem — may be critical to forestalling alcoholism in later
life.
Critics worry that the revised definition will stigmatize young people who meet the criteria for an alcohol disorder — routinely consuming four or five drinks rapidly in a short period of time or blacking out, for example — but who modify their drinking habits in their 20s. The fear is that the more expansive clinical label will force them into rigid treatment models or might even encourage self-fulfilling behavior.
But why are we getting bogged down in debates about diagnostic labels when the real issue is how to reduce harm? Drunk by any other name is still drunk.