Start Early to Help Children Combat Alcohol-Saturated TV

ARTICLE REPRINT • From the March 1998 AAP News, the official news magazine of the American Academy of Pediatrics

My daughter has already learned a lot about beer, wine and other alcoholic drinks-and she's only 8 years old. Long before she will have her first surreptitious experience with drinking (and, unfortunately, the onset of first use is getting younger and younger), Rachel will have learned quite a bit about what happens when people drink alcohol.

Since my husband and I use alcohol occasionally in our home, Rachel has acquired a lot of beliefs, knowledge and attitudes about beer, wine and other alcoholic beverages from us, her parents. But she's learned even more from her experience with media. The vivid images of daring, young, sexy, happy drinkers are ubiquitous in our society. A survey reported in Harper's Magazine noted that 10-year-olds could name more brands of beer than names of American presidents. During prime-time television, two-thirds of programs contain portrayals of drinking or verbal references to it.

It's challenging for adults to recognize the ways in which children and adolescents are learning from the mass media-but whether we like it or not, media exposure provides some of the most vital and potent information about how our society works, what the social and cultural norms are, and how people do or should behave.

That's why television, in particular, is so important to children ages 8 to 15. It's a powerful vehicle for learning about adult behavior. Alcohol advertising is one of the most important genres to explore when the goal is to increase young people's resiliency to substance abuse by strengthening their media literacy skills. Young people will see over a million drinking scenes by the time they are 18 years old-scenes in which the negative effects of drinking are rarely shown. Teens in one large-scale survey overwhelmingly responded that while they were aware that advertising makes drinking look better than it is, it still influenced them to drink more.

So we can't just dismiss or trivialize the messages children and young people receive about alcohol. We have to help them learn to critically analyze these messages. Media education can help young people re-interpret alcohol advertising by providing them with an increased understanding of the reasons why the world depicted through the media is sometimes distorted and inaccurate.

Pediatricians can engage patients and their parents in basic media education steps by routinely asking about the child's television viewing habits and recommending that children watch no more than one to two hours per day, as recommended in the AAP policy statement, "Children, Adolescents, and Television."

With children-especially at home with your own-you can discuss the purpose of commercials (to sell products) and the enormous financial investment of companies to make drinking alcoholic beverages look attractive and without negative consequences.

Rachel and I talk about how much it costs to make an alcohol commercial-upwards of $600,000 for one 30-second beer ad. We discuss the way advertisers use images, sounds and language to build connections between powerful feelings (like risk-taking, being mature, sexy, funny, or popular) and the product. We talk about why lizards, frogs, dogs and other animals are used to capture and direct our attention--and why we like these images--because they make us laugh!

We flip through the pages of magazines, tear out alcohol ads, and change the slogans to communicate a message that more closely matches our family's beliefs, attitudes and values about alcohol. What are they? Use only after you've reached age 21. Use alcohol at home or in a safe place. Enjoy alcohol but be careful not to drink too much. Don't drive after drinking. Don't drink to escape a bad mood or bad feelings.

A recent study by Erica Austin of Washington State University shows that third-graders who received media education in school had significantly different attitudes about alcohol use than students who didn't get such education. Media education provides an opportunity for parents, teachers, medical professionals and all who care about youth to articulate priorities and values as they confirm or contradict the many different ways adult behavior is represented in the mass media.

By asking patients to take a few minutes to think about alcohol use, you might help them think about television and drinking in a new way.

At age 8, Rachel is learning how to ask questions about everything she watches, reads and listens to, and that's the best skill to have for life in the Information Age.

Renee Hobbs is associate professor of Communication, Babson College, and director of the Media Literacy Project, Clark University, Worcester, Mass.

Reprinted with permission. American Academy of Pediatrics, AAP News, March 1998.