I sometimes wonder if my perspective on drinking might be different had my parents allowed me to drink when I was in high school.
As it was, my parents did not encourage drinking before I was 21. I believe that the bulk of their reasoning was: I should not drink before I was legally allowed to do so, and that was that.
But parents — and their concerns — drop almost completely out of the picture when many 18-year-olds go to college. On many campuses, alcohol is readily available to students of all ages and becomes a staple of the social scene. If students are surrounded by such a climate for three years before most reach the legal drinking age … well, peer pressure can do in even the most conscientious, law-abiding kid.
Flash-forward to the 21st birthday party. For many people I know, this involved getting absolutely plastered and passing out somewhere, hopefully near someone who was responsible — or at least sober — enough to put you in your own bed and make sure you didn’t expire overnight.
It’s tough to debate the merits of allowing students to drink alcohol before they reach 21, or before they are unleashed unwittingly upon Animal House-like frat parties every weekend. The big problem is: underage drinking is just that — it’s against the law.
Still, the growing problem of binge drinking on college campuses has led some to question if there might be a way to stop students from becoming absorbed in the “black-out drunk” culture before they even arrive on the scene, that is, years before they turn 21.
New York Times wine blogger Eric Asimov asks today in his blog, “The Pour” — “Should wine be a family affair?” In a related column, he debates the merits of introducing his two sons, 16 and 17, to wine as a complement to a meal, while trying to impress upon them the potential dangers of alcohol. He muses:
It would be easy to preach abstinence to children until they’re 21, but is it naive and even irresponsible to think that teenagers won’t experiment? Might forbidding even a taste of wine with a meal actually encourage secrecy and recklessness?
And:
In the best of all possible worlds, I suppose, young adults would not touch alcohol until they turn 25 and then would instantly understand the pleasures of moderate consumption. It seems to me as silly to imagine that as it is to expect the same at 21.
Does introducing teenagers to alcohol in moderation before age 21 encourage them to be more responsible drinkers? Asimov cites a 1983 study by Dr. George E. Vaillant, a psychiatry professor at Harvard, which compared 136 men who were alcoholics with men who were not.
The study found that men who grew up in families where alcohol was forbidden at the table, but who drank alcohol away from home, apart from food, were seven times more likely to become alcoholics than those whose households allowed wine with meals but where drunkenness was not tolerated.
Believe it? I’m not sure, and I think like with most things, it depends on the person and the situation. But if teaching a teenager how to enjoy wine with food can encourage less black-out nights, it’s definitely worth a second thought.
I’ve been feeling kind of uninspired recently, but here are some things I’ve been reading over the last couple of days:
If you’re planning on getting sloshed for St. Patrick’s Day, you’re probably not thinking about what effect either choosing aluminum cans or glass bottles of your favorite beer would have on the environment. But, just in case you do care, Brendan Koerner has the answer (and more) in Slate: it depends on more factors that probably ever would have imagined.
“If your chosen tipple is produced very close to home and your town has a robust recycling program, then glass bottles are probably the way to go,” says Koerner. “But if your preferred suds are brewed far away, by a company that’s even mildly eco-aware, aluminum cans are the wiser choice.”
On CNN.com today: Who needs a priest when you have the Internet? More and more people are turning to online communities to confess their sins. Tens of thousands log on to visit virtual confessional booths at ivescrewedup.com, mysecret.tv and dailyconfessions.com. Warning: the sites contain mature and often disturbing content.
Psychologists say the sites offer an opportunity to some people who have maybe never had the courage to talk about their guilt before. On the other hand, they often aren’t receiving responses or reassurance, let alone human contact.
You just better hope God is a frequent email-checker.
Newsweek had an interesting article on March 3 on how the human brain perceives race, and what that means for the presidential election.
Finally, how cool is this photo:
My kayaking coach from high school sent me a link to Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong blog, where he talks about a recent trip to Hawaii and paddling, literally, with a humpback whale:
We had a pretty humbling and awesome experience with the whale you see in the photos here. We were going along in the LIVESTRONG outrigger when a humpback popped its face up out of the water, gave us a look and then tucked back into the water to swim under our boat. I swam with a whale shark once which also humbles you but this was pretty interesting. I was A LITTLE excited and A LOT scared.
Awesome way to spend a vacation! Maybe I’ll go whale watching this weekend.
The New York Times this morning expounds of the phenomenon of “drunkorexia,” which, like “quarterlife,” may or may or may not be an actual term coined to describe one of many self-inflicted illnesses or neuroses plaguing Generation Y.
“Drunkorexia” is not a term I’m familiar with, but then again that probably just means I’m out of the pop culture loop.
Says the NYT,
The latest entry in the lexicon of food-related ills is drunkorexia, shorthand for a disturbing blend of behaviors: self-imposed starvation or bingeing and purging, combined with alcohol abuse.
Drunkorexia is not an official medical term. But it hints at a troubling phenomenon in addiction and eating disorders. Among those who are described as drunkorexics are college-age binge drinkers, typically women, who starve all day to offset the calories in the alcohol they consume. The term is also associated with serious eating disorders, particularly bulimia, which often involve behavior like bingeing on food — and alcohol — and then purging.
Anorexics, because they severely restrict their calorie intake, tend to avoid alcohol. But some drink to calm down before eating or to ease the anxiety of having indulged in a meal. Others consume alcohol as their only sustenance. Still others use drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine to suppress their appetites.
I’m actually not really sure what to make of this. But I will ask: is there some reason why this article is in the “Fashion and Style” section? Just saying.
“You see beers all over a table so you lift each one up until you find one half full and chug it when no one is looking.” (#10)
“You call your ex-boyfriend 1,000 times and leave lots of really nice voicemails saying that ya’ll need to hang out more.” (#29)
“You’ve become convinced that dancing with your arms overhead, shaking your ass, and yelling WOO HOO is truly the sexiest dance move EVER.” (#3)
A Facebook group called “30 Reasons Girls Should Call it a Night” is getting attention because of its list of 30 reasons, plus nearly 5,000 photos posted on the site of girls being, well, just drunk and ridiculous.
[M]any photos on the site are accompanied by full names and the colleges they attend, showing a blatant disregard for the fact that potential employers could be viewing their drunken exploits.
A study by the networking firm Viadeo recently found that one in five employers now uses social networking Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, to research information on job candidates and to view how they project themselves. Almost two thirds said their recruitment decisions were influenced by the contents of an individual’s profile, while a quarter said that they had changed their mind and decided not to hire someone because of what they found online.
As if you needed another reason to not post ridiculous photos of yourself or your friends online…
Going off to college, whether it means going across the island or halfway around the world, is a kind of freedom we have never before experienced. Suddenly, we have the ability to step out from under the watchful eyes of parents and make our own decisions. For many, there hasn’t ever been anything quite like it.
We encounter all kinds of new things in college, and alcohol is one of them.
At my school, drinking was a huge part of social life. Although we had no Greek system, the sports teams for the most part took up the duty of making sure the college had an active social scene. And since we were a tiny community of a little more than 2,000 people in a 2-bar, 6-restaurant town, with the closest “big” city (Albany, NY) more than an hour away, you can imagine that most of us weren’t going to the opera on the weekends.
As a 105-lb. half-Asian female, I obviously arrived on the scene with something of a disadvantage when it came to drinking. To give an example, my freshman year roommate was 6′1″. I soon realized that, for me, not being careful with alcohol wasn’t just a prescription for a bad Sunday morning — it was downright dangerous.
I watched my high school and college friends, most of whom weren’t big drinkers prior to college, deal with the newfound drinking scene. Nearly everyone tried it out. Some soon got bored (or sick) and gave it up. Some drank socially a few times a week.
Others became completely absorbed in it, drinking heavily four or more nights a week. Some people I knew, even girls, occasionally joked that the weekly goal was to get “black-out” drunk… or so intoxicated that you wouldn’t remember most of the night the next morning.
I wondered why some people became such avid drinkers in college and others just weren’t as interested. Was it our personalities? Our backgrounds? And could exposure to alcohol in high school make a person more or less prone to binge drinking in college?
According to a 2003 state Department of Health drug study, 13 percent of Hawaii sixth graders, 37 percent of eighth graders, 59 percent of tenth graders and 73 percent of twelfth graders have tried alcohol. Thirteen percent of Hawaii eighth graders, 33 percent of tenth graders and 52 percent of twelfth graders reported being drunk at least once (these numbers were lower among Hawaii students compared to students nationwide in the same grades — 20 percent, 42 percent and 58 percent respectively).
When we get to college, I wonder whether it’s actually the alcohol that excites us, or more so the availability of alcohol, (often) the lack of restrictions and the excitement that comes with all of that. I think it’s probably the latter, since as my friends and I got older, there was much less reckless drinking and more measured drinking for social reasons.
Well. For most of us, anyway.
Binge drinking in college — ESPECIALLY the underage variety — is a serious subject. In our 20s, we may think we’re indestructible, but drinking heavily even now can lead to major health problems later in life. Not to mentioned the dreaded “beer belly.”
And, in the worst case scenario, it can cut your life short before you even get a shot at being 30.
As we get into Quarter Life, I hope we can learn from college indiscretions. It’s when you’re several years out of school and still looking at each weekend like it’s freshman year that there’s a problem.
