Study: Does Alcohol in Movies Drive Teens to Binge Drink?

The article I read for teenage drinking is called, “Study: Does Alcohol in Movies Drive Teens to Binge Drink?” This article was published on March 5, 2012. I got this article on the Time Magazine website, http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/05/study-does-alcohol-in-movies-drive-teens-to-binge-drink. This article talked about doing a study and figuring out whether teens are getting the idea that drinking is ok from movies. Studies suggest that when teens see drinking scenes from movies, they are more likely to binge drink. This is not definite yet, because they are not sure if that’s the whole reason behind it. Although, they have done surveys on how many times characters were shown drinking alcohol in movies. They have totaled about 86 percent out of 655 movies were showing at least one drinking scene. Then they took about 16,000 teens that were from the ages of 10 to 19 and gave them a survey on how many times they seen a movie that has at least one drinking scene. The end result, the students have at least seen more than 10,000 alcohol scenes totaled altogether. This then leads to some of them thinking that drinking is ok, that movie stars are doing it and tempts them to try it. What they are suggesting now is to have parents watch shows, movies, and talk about what they are watching with the teens, but not to the extent of having “parental controls.” I honestly think movies can play a small part of this, because some scenes just show when an adult drinks, nothing happens to them. We all know that alcohol can do much more than just what we seen on the actual screen.