Teen Drinking

Younger Girls Binge Drinking More

CBS Evening News, May 6, 2007

Correspondent: Randall Pinkston

This story claims there is an “alarming growth in binge drinking by girls under the age of 15.” The girl featured to illustrate the story said she downed “rows of shot glasses with eighty per cent rum,” “hooked up with guys,” even “ran out in the street naked.”

“By age 15 approximately half the boys and girls in America have had a whole drink of alcohol, according to a report by the U.S. Surgeon General,” the report states. “While binge drinking is going down, there's been a big change between the ages of 12 and 14, where girls are drinking more than boys.”

The girl’s parents “rarely drink, kept a close look on their daughter,” the report continued, and were praised by the girl as “perfect examples as parents.” She blamed only “peer pressure from high school” for drinking.

Why this report is misleading:

The report nowhere documents its central claim: that there is an increase in binge drinking by girls. Major surveys such as Monitoring the Future, the National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health, and PRIDE do not reveal any increase in drinking or binge drinking among junior high youth of either sex. Both Monitoring and National Household reveal substantial declines, in fact.

In fact, drinking by younger teens has plummeted. In 2006, Monitoring the Future (Tables 1-4) revealed that 40.5% of 8th graders had drank at least one full drink, compared to 70.1% in the first survey in 1991. Binge drinking: 12.9% in 1991, 10.9% in 2006. But political interests need the public to believe that younger teen drinking is worse, and the media always complies.

The report pretends that “peer pressure” is the cause of younger teens’ alcohol problems and that “perfect” parents must be even more “suspicious” of their teens. If CBS and public health officials wanted to report realistically on alcohol problems among younger teens, they would have pointed out that few younger teens suffer serious drinking or drug problems and that the fraction who do tend to have parents who abuse alcohol and drugs, suffer violent and sexual abuses, and suffer divorced or severely chaotic families. Family history explains far more of the problems the report attributes to teen drinking (including abusive drinking itself) than peer pressure or mere alcohol use itself.

The report does not mention that actually, teens suffer rising binge drinking by parents more than the other way around. The National Household Survey (Figure 3.1) finds that from 2000 to 2005, binge drinking by younger teens declined. But among adults ages 40-59, binge drinking increased from 16.1 million in 2000 to 17.5 million in 2005—middle-aged rates 13 times higher than found among younger teens and considerably higher even than found among older teens. But discussing the effects of adult alcohol abuse on youth is a taboo topic.

The effects of this CBS report and the officials it quotes are to manufacture false alarm of a rising crisis, to scapegoat teens and their peers for the serious alcohol abuse problems that exist among Americans of all ages, and to dismiss the family problems suffered by the large majority of younger teens with drinking problems.