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A recent study from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism published over on MomLogic.com states that middle-school aged children who are allowed to view programming with an ‘R’ rating (or worse!) are often subliminally encouraged to participate in pre-teen drinking binges.
The study involved 6,000 middle-school aged participants and showcased a variance of movies with a variety of ratings ranging from ‘G’ to ‘R’. The children were asked to check off the movies that they’d seen during their short careers as human beings and were also asked about intermittent alcohol experiences in a completely different setting. The authors of the study claimed that there was, indeed, a link between the frequency of R-rated program viewing and occasional alcohol usage for the demographic of children aged 10-14 years. Researchers on the project blamed this trigger-effect on the level of sensation-seeking behavior exhibited in the children who admitted to watching R-rated films.
I guess my main question is: do you guys buy this? Although the effects of sensation-seeking endorphins have long been proven, do you feel that it applies to pre-pubescent children and drinking?
For any of you who have children, or take care of others’ children, what are your guidelines when it comes to age-appropriate programming, if any?
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I don’t buy it. I watched a lot of totally inappropriate TV as a kid and as a teen. The local video rental store had a closing down sale when I was 13 and I acquired a few dozen 18- and X- rated movies (the UK equivalents to R broadly speaking) so I was technically too young for about 80% of my video collection.
My underage drinking career was basically non-existent and always conducted in a mature manner. My friend had wine and some of those cocktails in bottles kinda drink like a bottle of pina colada. We got a little tipsy but it was in her back yard with her parents watching and we were certainly fine to walk downtown and catch the bus afterwards. The only other time I remember drinking significant amounts was at a friends house and again it was just a wine and movies kinda night. We weren’t hiding anything or drinking so much we’d throw up, just a girls night in scenario.
I don’t buy it. ’subliminally encouraged’???
I buy the link. But once again, people have forgotten what should probably be a researcher’s first checkpoint – correlation IS NOT causation.
I don’t buy the explanation on reasoning – then again, that may have been added by the story-writers.
Then again, I don’t believe the results of any study that is not conducted at least double-blind.
To me, this looks like reads like the old ‘ice cream sales cause drowning’ example (where the correlation between the two factors is caused by a third factor not included in the study).
I *could* easily believe that children who are permitted to watch R-rated movies are also more likely to be permitted to (or not prevented from) drink underage. The two could easily go together with fairly permissive, or completely uninvolved parenting.
That doesn’t mean that watching R-rated movies will subliminally encourage drinking.
Do adults who watch R-rated movies at higher rates consume more alcohol?
Great response! I definitely think there is a third factor that is not fully being explored. I have been allowed to watch rated-R movies since I was 6 or 7. I remember seeing Saving Private Ryan, American Pie, and Scary Movie with my brother and dad at different points in my life. By the time I realized that I was the only person in most of my classes that had been allowed to watch those movies, I asked my dad about it. His response? That he knew it was okay for me to watch these movies because he had raised us to be smart enough to enjoy fiction/entertainment without the need to emulate it. I *could* be the exception, but I think there are other parents out there like my own.
Oh but people do so love to link correlated things and say that one causes the other. Hell, from this study we could say that underage drinking causes people to watch R rated movies.
I’m going to just throw this out here. Maybe the parents that let their young children watch R rated movies are also the kind of parents that don’t care about their young children drinking.
I agree with the above two posters — this is faulty causality in this study. Parents who don’t supervise underage drinking aren’t going to supervise the movies their kids see either. Speaking as a serious underage drinker, I can tell you that it was easier for me to sneak drinks under my parents noses than it was for me to get into a movie they didn’t want me to see. For better or worse, I guess :)
I’m in total agreement with the previous posters. Parents who don’t set good examples and don’t explain to their children how alcohol can be abused contribute to underage drinking, whether or not these kids see the movies w/o their parents permission. Of course, if you consider that the parents of said parents could have also lacked parenting skills, is it really their fault, or that of society in general?
On another note, is this problem as prevalent in Europe, where drinking is more of a family affair?
I’d say so. Most parents I know here in the US are very strict about drinking and I know plenty of people who won’t even allow their 19 or 20 year old offspring to have a sip of wine at a family meal. Most of the parents I know in the UK are quite happy to let their teens have a little drink on special occasions and aren’t too upset if they sneak a bit of booze while out on a Saturday night. As mentioned before I had a few drinks as a teen and they were all sanctioned by adults, either a glass of wine with a special dinner or a girls night in with friends and a couple of bottles of wine.
ID checking is a much bigger deal in most US bars than it is in UK bars too. I knew many a teenager who walked in to a bar they day they turned 18 and asked for the usual because they’d been drinking there for years. Our local liquor store was happy to sell booze to kids who said they were buying it for their parents. My husband only recently stopped getting checked here and he’s 30 and balding.
Rhonda, the penalty here for under age drinking is huge.
1. Regardless of whether they are driving or not – they automatically lose their driver’s license.
2. Don’t have a license yet? You are pre-suspended. You automatically lose your license for 90 days as soon as you qualify for one.
3. Fine for a 1st offense here in PA runs about $3 50.
4. Just wait til your car insurance company finds out that your license has been suspended. A kid can expect to pay a minmum of $3000 per year.
My son got arrested for “possession of alcohol by a minor”. He was 19 at the time. His blood alcohol didn’t even register – he told me he had taken perhaps a sip or 2. He wasn’t driving – he was at a friend’s house for a picnic.
He lost his license, got the $350 fine and my insurance went from $2000 per year to $6400.
When I was underage (19, 20 years old), I was given two MIPs (charges of minor in possession of alcohol). For each, I had to pay a $350 fine, do 10 hours of community service, and have my license suspended for 3 months.
It’s completely ridiculous. Mind you, I was over 18, not driving, and for the first, was floating the river (in an inner tube, it’s a big thing to do down here in Texas), the second I was at a house party, again not driving.
While I understand the rationalization for the older drinking age limit, that does not mean I find it fair. At 18, by law I am considered an adult–I can vote, join the military, smoke cigarettes, etc.–why one should still be unable to consume alcoholic beverages is beyond me, and the punishment for committing such an offense is absolutely excessive.
Oh I know the penalties, I just did drivers ed 2 years ago! It was kind of funny because there were two students over 18 in the class so every time he was explaining age specific penalties he had to do both things. I agree that there should be stricter punishments for juvenile drivers but the differences can be quite excessive. In my state a driver over age 18 pays a $300 fine for going 30 over the limit. A driver under 18 pays something like $3200 between higher fines, remedial driving school, and retaking the test.
One of my friends still doesn’t drive because she lost her license in college. She had a couple of sips of beer at a party because she was the designated driver. She was pulled over for a routine check and just barely registered on the breathalyzer but the campus had a zero tolerance policy. She had to go in front of a judge and he took her license and put her on a two year suspension. She just never bothered retaking the test when her suspension was up.
@ Whit – you left out get married, buy a house or car, go to jail (including being sentenced to death) and enter into any kind of contract.
It’s a shame that you can be considered old enough to these things, yet you apparently don’t have enough sense to drink responsibly.
I do believe we are the only western culture to take such a puritanical view.
Blurry, it’s completely asinine. It’s insulting to the intelligence of those responsible 18 year olds out there that merely would like a beer or glass of wine with dinner, or hell, the 18 year old that just wants to sit at home and get hammered. It’s their choice!
Your country is nuts. Like drinking. 19 is stupid enough. 21 is completely ridiculous. Not only can you do all the things mentioned thusfar, you can be DRAFTED. To WAR. And be not permitted to drink alcohol? Completely asinine.
When you can vote, and go off to college, and are considered in charge of yourself in every other way at 18, to have three more years before you can consume alcohol makes no sense at all.
^My thought changed halfway through and I failed to notice. Please ignore the ‘like drinking’ bit. it is no longer necessary or logical to the sentence.
Young people in Europe start drinking when they are 14 or 15. I was a late starter at 16! I am now 21 and when I’m back home from Uni my parents offer me beer, wine, cava, vermouth, or whatever they are having. Dad even bought me cider, as finding it in Spain is harder and I miss it dearly.
Underage drinking happens, you won’t be able to buy alcohol at supermarkets, and getting ID’d is completely at the bar’s discretion. I look like a kid when I have no make up and was refused to be served beer at a pub, and then I went into another one and there were at least five 15-year-olds completely off their tits drinking.
Now then, the fine for selling alcohol to teenagers is a high one! Kids don’t get fined though.
99% of the time a more probable cause of delinquent kids is weak parenting.
Frankly, it’s not just the causality that’s at question here, but also the context…
There’s a big difference between the uninvolved parenting where kids are watching these movies and drinking behind their parents backs, and doing the same in a safe, supervised environment.
Also, I have to ask what do they mean by underage binges? I wouldn’t class a glass of wine over dinner as a binge, and there are plenty of other studies that show that kids who are allowed to drink under the supervision of a parent are less like to over-indulge when they reach adulthood.
As for endorphins, and sensation-seeking risk-taking, it’s only applicable to those who aren’t supervised, else it’s not exactly forbidden fruit.
Of course there is a corellation between these factors, but you can’t make such a sweeping claim about causation, even with more careful analysis of context.
Bad science here, methinks.
Regardless of whether there’s a link or not, I still wouldn’t let my kids watch movies that they are too young for–unless I had seen it first, and knew that the kids were mature enough to handle it. That’s just commonsense parenting, IMO.
That’s what I do. I think the movie ratings system is a bit of a joke quite frankly. There are PG movies that I wouldn’t let my son watch but he’s seen several PG-13s and even a couple of R rated movies, mostly older ones that would probably be PG-13 or even PG by today’s standards. Between the changing standards (movies that would have been X 30 years ago are often PG or PG-13 now) and the crazy criteria like showing as much violence as you like but no nipples it’s just a meaningless system for the most part.
I still have bad memories of watching RoboCop being shot up when I was a kid.
Poor RoboCop…..I cried for him.
When I was four, a friend’s older sister let us watch “Killer Clowns from Outer Space”.
Not a good movie for for year olds…..
^ *FOUR-year-olds.
Ugh.
No joke. The MPAA is getting ridiculous. Everybody should watch “This Film is Not Yet Rated”.
Just to throw my two cents in, I don’t really buy this study. The whole setup of the study just seems fishy to me. Mostly because of the number of middle-school children they surveyed. 6,000??? And where were they getting them from. I know for a fact that kids in certain areas start drinking more than others, whether or not they watch R rated movies. Personally, like some other posters, I started watching R movies when I was really young. Still in elementary school if I remember correctly (it’s been a while :)). And I didn’t have my first drink until I was legal. My parents never drank around me (ok, maybe a beer if we went out to a restaurant) and they were VERY up front with me about what their expectations were for my behavior and what they would NOT tolerate. So honestly, I think this whole this B.S. Do I think there could be a correlation? Maybe. But honestly, if you look hard enough, and play with your numbers, you make anything correlate.
The first R rated movie I ever watched was “Dangerous Minds” in 8th grade, and I had to call my mother, ask her permission, and then she made me read the back of the video (VHS!!!) sleeve to her. She finally let me watch it, but said that in no way was I to mimic the language or actions of those in the movie! Haha!
Looking back, she was probably being a little overprotective, but oh well, she was just doing what she felt was right by me, and I appreciate that more than anything.
I should probably mention that I was at a sleepover. I didn’t just, like, randomly call my mother from my room or anything. Thought I’d clarify. :)
This sounds really, eerily similar to the circumstance I was once put in — at a sleepover, nonetheless — regarding the same movie. … You weren’t there, too, were you? LOL
Haha, that IS strange! Unless you were at Tara’s house in Clute, TX, in what–1997?! Ha!
First R rated that I was old enough to remember was The Piano, very dark but I still love that movie, I was probably about 4 but then again movies weren’t monitored in my home, neither was drinking but I’m not really a drinker by nature it just doesn’t appeal to me so I never really had this problem and I’ve only been wasted at a party once or twice.
Apparently I’m the only person on the planet who didn’t like that movie. A bunch of my friends went to see it at the cinema and said it was wonderful so I rented it but didn’t see the appeal at all.
Everyone has a movie like that, so far mine has been Wall-E.
Mine is How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Loathe.
Mine is Star Wars. All of them.
That is crazy and sad all at the same time.
In the end, it’s really up to the parents to do their part.
I agree with the fact that letting your kids watch certain stuff can really fuck them up. BUT i also agree, that it’s all about the parents. We all know our kids are gonna try alcohol sooner or later, but if you provide them with it, then i believe it is totally your fault. Watching it, having it in the house, etc, it just makes them believe it’s ok to do it, and they’re not old enough (or smart enough sometimes…) to understand what could happen if they abuse it.
I know there are lots of (very) “open mind” parents out there, and i also agree with Rhonda when she explains how different things are in other countries, but i, myself, would never provide my kids with anything like that, and i’m a HUGE freak when it comes to what they watch on tv (sometimes i even find spongebob a little too much… let’s put it that way..) It’s just not ok, in my opinion, to let the kids believe that R rated movies are aproppiate, i definately disagree with that, and i do believe it affects them when they do..
I don’t know if that makes any sense at all.. LOL.. I got carried away… Sorry about that..
And alcohol is sooooooooooo horrible, that for them to have a drink will probably addict them instantly, ruin their future, and destroy their brain? The point is that the attitude matters. There is nothing wrong or destructive with enjoying a glass of wine with dinner, or a good beer every now and then. Parents who allow their kids to have some alcohol here and there are attempting to instill that ‘okay in moderation’ view of alcohol, instead of making it an interesting forbidden substance to be played around with and consumed in massive unhealthy quantities.
Often, they succeed.
R-rated movies are given that rating for many different reasons. Do people really become magically mature upon their eighteenth birthday? Is a girl at eighteen years and one day mature enough to watch something that a girl at seventeen years and three hundred and sixty four days is not?
Many parents choose to review the material themselves, determine why it has the rating it does, and then decide whether their personal beliefs on appropriateness line up with the rating boards, and may allow a person of a different age to view it.
I, for example, would show Saving Private Ryan to a teenager in the context of understanding what some people have been through. That doesn’t make it an irresponsible ‘watch anything at any age/I have no standards’ situation.
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