Eighty-seven percent of parents said they think spending time on social networking sites does not make it more likely their child will drink alcohol; 89 percent of parents felt it would not make their child more likely to use drugs.
My first glance at the report does not convince me that these large parental majorities are wrong.
who connects drugs/drinking with social media, either more or less? why don't they apply the same study to bowling? or snowboarding?
Posted by: sean coon | Aug 24, 2011 at 03:00 PM
I believe video games make kids more violent, but my dataset consists of one 10-year-old.
Posted by: Lex | Aug 24, 2011 at 05:35 PM
@Sean: The study was conducted by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Their conclusions include suggestions that social networking site owners make changes in light of the data. I don't think that researchers, parents or anyone else is really concerned with lessening teen bowling or snowboarding. Teen substance abuse is a different story.
Posted by: michele | Aug 24, 2011 at 07:18 PM
Contact with kids and adults who drink and make it look like fun for others kids is probably worth noticing, whether the contact is real or virtual.
Posted by: justcorbly | Aug 24, 2011 at 08:25 PM
Teen substance abuse is directly related to our culture's hypocrisy in dealing with the plain and simple truth that being high is fun. Europeans face this fact with honesty and therefore let their youths free to discoverr how to balance the pleasure with moderation.
Posted by: Bill Yaner | Aug 24, 2011 at 10:01 PM
"Teen substance abuse is directly related to our culture's hypocrisy in dealing with the plain and simple truth that being high is fun. Europeans face this fact with honesty and therefore let their youths free to discoverr how to balance the pleasure with moderation."
Sobering (PI) truth. I can only find solace in your clarity in those observations compared to my perpetual cloudiness and flip-flopping, in the assumption that you have no children.
Posted by: john hayes | Aug 25, 2011 at 08:00 AM
My guess is that eighty-seven percent of parents are clueless, just as parents have always been.
Posted by: Billy Jones | Aug 25, 2011 at 08:15 AM
billy: that was the red flag for me..
"87% of parents think...."
"89% of parents felt..."
there were more feelers than thinkers
my experience with my children in the 80's was their exposure to alcohol and drugs had the highest correlation with public schools. if the most expensive protection scheme in he world cannot keep drugs out of prisons, then there is no way in hell of keeping them out of schools. both systems provide captive clientele and protection for vendors. social networks make it impractical to interview all of your children's peers.
Posted by: tk solomon | Aug 25, 2011 at 10:53 AM
My doubt is about the causality (..."make their child more likely..."), not the correlation.
Posted by: Ed Cone | Aug 25, 2011 at 10:58 AM
TK,
I was in school in the 70s and drugs were everywhere-- alcohol too. I was raising a child in the 80s and school was still a recent memory for me. He turned out better than his father.
Bill Yaner's comment rings very true with me:
"Teen substance abuse is directly related to our culture's hypocrisy in dealing with the plain and simple truth that being high is fun. Europeans face this fact with honesty and therefore let their youths free to discoverr how to balance the pleasure with moderation."
I can excuse my parents as they were simple mountain people who didn't even know these drugs existed until after I was using them. They were also products of one room school houses where supervision was much stricter than schools today. But today's parents have no excuses.
When my son was coming up I was very open with him about my own experiences with drugs and alcohol. I didn't allow him to use drugs but I also didn't lie to him about drugs. Sure, he tried some but not to the extent that I did.
Time to gut the grass... ah, I mean, lawn.
Posted by: Billy Jones | Aug 25, 2011 at 11:10 AM
Michelle, my point was that I don't believe that social networks cause teens to drink. Period. For a group to spend time researching it seems like a waste of time. Social angst, challenging authority, peer pressure, pre-adolescent shifts in hormones, lack of parental guidance (which only helps to the degree the former challenges don't). -- all of this has been going on *forever*. It just seems like a silly study, rather self-concluding.
Posted by: sean coon | Aug 25, 2011 at 03:47 PM
I think there can be some statistical improvement to this study, using existing data. They are comparing teens who say they spend ANY time on social networking sites with those that spend no time. 1 minute per day is the equivalent to 1 hour per day. Plus the questioning is "In a typical day, how many hours do you spend on Facebook, MySpace or other social networking site? If you are usually not on a social networking site in a typical day, please answer 0; if usually less than one hour, use only minutes." In a TYPICAL day. So those zeros may not be really zeros for once in a while users who may also see pictures of friends drunk/high/passed out. Here is the breakdown of responses:
30% 0 minutes
22% 1-30 minutes
18% 31-60 minutes
7% 61-90 minutes
9% 91-120 minutes
13% More than 2 hours
I would imagine that there is a much higher correlation for drinking/drugs for the 1/8th of the survey who is on social networking > 2 hrs on a typical day than those in the 1-30 minute category. That seems to me to be a sign of boredom. I think the problem is that kids have the time to spend on social networking more than what they might actually see. I'd like to see a similar study done for adults. At my daughter's dance recital rehearsal I saw lots of smart phones on facebook.
Teen drug use is down since the 70's.
Posted by: JimC | Aug 25, 2011 at 05:02 PM