No School for Sots

By Amy Dickinson

"Everything is an occasion to drink--happy or sad. We just drink for any reason." That's what I heard on campus last week when I asked a group of college upperclassmen to comment on a full-page newspaper ad signed by 113 college presidents. The ad features a huge bottle of "Binge Beer" and warns parents that binge drinking on campus has reached dangerous proportions. The awareness campaign, spearheaded by Graham Spanier, president of Penn State, is backed up by a study of binge drinking released by Harvard's School of Public Health, in which 43% of college students were identified as binge drinkers. That means they drank five or more beers or drinks (four for women) at least once in the two-week period before the study. One-fifth of all college students are "frequent" binge drinkers, consuming an average of 17.9 drinks a week. The Harvard study also shows that nearly a third of all students start college with binge-drinking problems. "The kind of drinking going on today is very different from what parents might remember when they attended high school or college," Spanier said. And indeed, what I heard anecdotally is that these binge drinkers are drinking not to get silly but to pass out.

Out of a group of 18 students I spoke with at a small liberal-arts college near my home, five said they had been hospitalized at one time with alcohol overdoses. Two had been involved in separate incidents on campus over the previous weekend in which students they were with overdosed and were treated by paramedics. The students also told me that while they take complete responsibility for their actions, however stupid, the atmosphere on campuses is very beer-friendly. Anyone can get a keg, they say, or find someone of legal age who will. The local bars card them, "but that's a joke." They drink, they say, because they want to. They overdrink because they don't know any better.

I know there are many people who feel that serving the occasional beer or wine to teenagers at home may actually decrease the allure of drinking. While that sounds logical (and very sophisticated), I think the more legitimate lesson is that there are simply some privileges and pleasures that should be confined to adults. We teach our children more by demonstrating how we handle our liquor than by giving it to them.

If you want to give your teen something sophisticated to go with dinner, try offering an extra portion of you. A different survey of 2,000 teenagers released last week shows a direct relationship between teen substance abuse and the lack of close familial connections--especially between children and their fathers. I asked my group of college students what they thought society could do for them--more ad campaigns, safer campuses, a lower drinking age? To a person, they said the real education should happen at home, starting well before they are teenagers, maybe as young as age seven. ("By the time you're a teen, you've stopped listening," said one.) The best approach, they said, is for parents to try to have an ongoing discussion with them, to listen rather than lecture and to provide a good example. They also thought the "Binge Beer" ad was lame. Why? "Because," they said, "by the time we're in college, no matter what you say to our parents, it's already too late."

For more information on binge drinking, see our website at time.com/personal You can e-mail Amy at timefamily@aol.com