Good news and bad news about young people and binge drinking: in the United States, anyway, reckless drinking is down over all, but not among college students. Among 18- to 20-year-old men who did not attend college, binge drinking declined more than 30 per cent between 1979 and 2006. But among male students it remained at a steady and significant level, while among female students -- and this is the really bad news -- it went up.

Researchers writing in The Journal of the American Academy of Adolescent Psychiatry linked the positive trend to the increase in the drinking age since the 1980s. In 1984 the federal government decided to withhold highway money from any state that did not have a minimum drinking age of 21, and over time all states fell into line.

The new research findings, based on information from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, in which binge drinking is defined as having five or more drinks in a session, give the lie to the position taken by a number of college officials who say the higher drinking age has forced drinking underground and encouraged alcohol abuse.

In an editorial The New York Times ticks the college presidents off, saying the study shows they should be reviewing their own policies and finding out just why students drink so much. Says the Times:

Just why the college crowd continues to drink so heavily is not clear. Students are less likely to live with parents or spouses who can ride herd on their drinking. Most have older friends who can legally buy alcohol. Fraternities and sororities may also foster irresponsible drinking. Whatever the causes, the solutions almost certainly lie mostly within the colleges — perhaps with better counseling or stronger bans on under-age drinking — not by lowering the legal drinking age.

The study found that almost half the college men surveyed and almost 40 per cent of the women had reported engaging in binge drinking. We agree with the Times that the college administrators need to stir themselves and actively discourage alcohol abuse. They may have the brightest kids in their colleges but those young people are still growing up -- as the brain researchers keep telling us -- until their mid-20s.

PS Did it all start with The Student Prince?

One of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century was summed up in the title of Norman Vincent Peale’s book, The Power of Positive Thinking, published in 1952. “It is of practical value to learn to like yourself. Since you must spend so much time with yourself you might as well get some satisfaction out of the relationship,” Peale is quoted as saying. Now some Canadian researchers are saying it doesn’t work -- for the people who need it most.

Professor Joanne Wood and colleagues from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, recruited a bunch of undergraduates and identified them as low or high in self-esteem. Then they were asked to repeat, “I am a loveable person,” every time a doorbell rang. When the researchers checked their mood they found that people already high in self-esteem felt better than people who didn’t repeat the statement, but those low in self-esteem felt worse.

"We think that [happened] because for the low self-esteem person it might elicit the opposite thought. So if I say to myself, 'I'm a lovable person and I'm low in self-esteem', I may start to think 'No, I'm not, and here are the ways in which I'm not a lovable person'. And then those kinds of thoughts could grow to overwhelm the positive self-esteem."

Hmmm. Like, “If I need to tell myself this, it is probably not true.” Anyway, says Professor Wood, the study may be reassuring for folks who have found that just positive thinking doesn’t work. "I think this tells them they're not alone in this frustration. That they can't expect a simple-minded statement that doesn't feel right to them would have a positive effect."

Sydney psychologist Gerardine Robinson agrees that getting people to say positive things to themselves doesn’t work. "If you're feeling down, and I say 20 things to you and only one of them is negative, which one are you going to remember? So you see, the way you feel can influence the way you think”.

Instead, she teaches people to “visualise themselves moving from a helpless mode into a competent mode. When we're in a competent mode we can grow, we're creative, we can think of multiple solutions to problems, we can be nurturing and healing of ourselves and others, and be compassionate," she said.

“It's a little bit like the AA axiom 'fake it til you make it'. So if you can teach a client to act as if they're in a competent mode, to imagine themselves in a competent mode, and how they would behave and think. So that's actually changing their behaviour."

Peale’s recipe for optimism had a religious basis -- he was a preacher -- and that could be one reason it appealed to people in the mid-twentieth century. Even with religious faith, however, self-esteem would be elusive unless a person experienced being loved by another (other) human being(s). Which leads us back to the family, in the first place.

Many experts are concerned about the effects on children of their being immersed in electronic media from a tender age. They worry largely about the things they are not doing while watching TV or videos: developing their vocabulary through talking to their parents; listening to or reading books; going to the park for healthy exercise and social activities. But two sociologists have come up with a novel reason for fretting about kids’ exposure to media: the risk of seeing heterosexuality as normal and desirable.

Yes, desirable! for heaven’s sake. Karin Martin and Emily Kazyak, writing in the latest issue of, ahem, Gender and Society, analysed all G-rated movies released, or re-released, between 1990 and 2005 that grossed more than $100 million in the United States. And guess what they found…

The analysis found the films "depict a rich and pervasive heterosexual landscape," despite the assumption that children's media are free of sexual content. The movies repeatedly mark relationships between opposite sex lead characters as special and magical.

"Characters in love are surrounded by music, flowers, candles, magic, fire, balloons, fancy dresses, dim lights, dancing and elaborate dinners," the researchers observed. "Fireflies, butterflies, sunsets, wind and the beauty and power of nature often provide the setting for—and a link to the naturalness of—hetero-romantic love."

But wait, it gets worse. These characters are depicted as “overtly feminised women and masculine males, with the male characters spending much of their time longingly gazing at the former. Toys and other products tied to the films later reinforce the images.”

Some people might worry about the sexualization of children’s media and merchandise. Period. In the UK children as young as four are being suspended from school for inappropriate sexual behaviour.

But our University of Michigan sociologists seem more concerned that “children understand the normativity of heterosexuality by the time they enter elementary school, relegating homosexuality to the abnormal, unusual and unexpected, necessitating explanation.”

It’s all the work of Disney artists stuck in the 19th century with the Brothers Grimm, apparently.

Even president Obama, who has declared June to be Gay pride Month, will have trouble changing this, we think. At least until he has finished with health care reform…

Science Daily, Jun 22

A survey of teenage use of the popular video-sharing website YouTube confirms that it is very easy for minors to give their age as 18 or over when creating an account on the site, and therefore to access objectionable material. Parents need to advise their children against looking for R18 videos and YouTube needs to make its safety features more prominent, a new report suggests.

“Anchor, Rockbrook and InterMedia (2009) YouTube:Usage & abusage” is a unique study carried out by five Irish teens from the Anchor Youth Centre in Dublin. Using contacts in schools in Ireland, Switzerland, Latvia, Poland and the Netherlands, the young researchers received completed questionnaires from over 3200 students aged 12 to 17. These were analysed with advice from an expert in the Dublin Institute of Technology, which is a member of the EU Kids Online network. InterMedia Consulting also helped with the project.

The study itself seems to be the first of its kind: “as far as we are aware there are no figures or statistics in relation to YouTube usage by teenagers,” the authors say.

Nearly all the respondents (94 per cent) said they used YouTube on a regular basis, and 51 per cent admitted to accessing R18 videos on the site. This requires that the user creates an account, but there is nothing to stop a person falsifying their age. Some 17 per cent of those surveyed did not answer the question whether they accessed the restricted videos, but of those who answered, 20 per cent of girls watched them rarely and 6 per cent often, while 32 per cent of boys watched them rarely and 18 per cent often. The differences may be explained by the types of videos boys tend to watch -- gaming comedy and entertainment -- as opposed to girls, who mostly view music videos.

There were country differences too: less than 28 per cent of Polish minors accessed restricted videos but the percent rose to 44 per cent in Ireland and 50 per cent in Switzerland.

Most of the teens used YouTube passively, neither creating accounts, downloading videos or uploading their own onto the site. They simply watch videos or listen to music -- a cheaper way to listen than downloading files.

“We can nearly conclude from this that –at least in the five countries we analysed– most young people don’t use YouTube to “broadcast yourself” as their motto says but simply to passively watch videos: so it is more of an alternative entertainment box than a social networking tool for sharing personal things with others.”

Only about a quarter of the young people had recourse to YouTube daily, and between 40 and 46 per cent one or two days a week. The majority accessed the site at home, the largest group nominating “my own room” as the usual place.

“One of the findings of this survey that shocked us the most is that hardly anybody (only 18%) has accessed the Safety Advice provided in all the pages of the YouTube website. However 26% of Under-13 year olds have accessed the Safety Advice, but as they get older, the percentage decreases: 16% for 13-14 year olds, and 12% for 15-17.”

“Perhaps it is not that surprising, as the link to the Safety Advice pages is buried at the bottom of the YouTube webpages. There should be more action taken on this issue, perhaps a more visible HELP button to make it easier to report things that minors may consider to be wrong, and that it will be dealt with efficiently, or even Safety Advice based advertisements before the videos.”

Personal interviews with 12 respondents revealed their perception that “parents were quite clueless about their doings on the Internet, and on YouTube in particular. We think that this is linked to the children not having Filters that can track what they do on the Internet and also to the fact that many adults are techno-phobes,” say the researchers. Reassuring, however, are indications that few teens use the site for networking or show curiosity in features like “Videos Watched Now”.

The authors conclude:

“It is far too easy to access over-18s videos: this needs to be restricted somehow. It may not be a revelation, but we have established that it is far too easy for minors to create over-18 accounts on YouTube and further more access over-18 videos. However, over 18’s videos on YouTube are on some occasions not worthy of the over-18’s label. What many consider to be adult material, i.e. Over 18’s content, is not available on YouTube. For the most part, 18’s videos on YouTube tend to be material that may in rare circumstances offend. Perhaps YouTube new initiative (Safe Channel) will go some way to prevent minors gaining access to these videos.”

Well done, guys.

My Sister’s Keeper, a movie that opens in the United States this Friday, brings to the big screen the pessimistic view of parenthood that has made writer Jodi Picoult enormously popular and rich. In this dark narrative a couple with a delinquent teenage son and a daughter who has an acute form of leukemia conceive a third child to serve as her bone-marrow donor.

New York Times reviewer Ginia Bellafante writes in an overview of Picoult's work: 

“Multiple operations on both girls follow over the span of many years, until the donor child, victim of a sort of abuse that is passing itself off as godliness, rebels at 13, devastating her mother by initiating legal proceedings to ensure her own corporeal autonomy.”

Parental inadequacy and misfortune culminate in a shocking end, which seems to be par for the course in Picoult’s sub-genre of misery lit: children in peril. Her novels, says Bellafante, “have the effect of questioning the redemptive value of motherhood. Really, why would anyone bother?”

Then again, why would anyone bother reading books (she has written 16 of them) in which parents are either responsible for, or too incompetent to stop horrors such as the sexual abuse and murder of their children or their suicide; in which children are afflicted with fatal or deforming diseases and their parents make a complete mess of dealing with it? Aren’t the majority of people in the world parents? How can a writer get away with such defamation?

Here’s what Bellafante suggests:

“The endangered or ruined child has emerged as a media entity within a culture that has idealized the responsibilities of parenthood to a degree, as has been exhaustively noted, unprecedented in human history. The more we seek to protect our children, the more we fear the consequences of an inability to do so. Increasingly over the past decade, writers of crime fiction — Harlan Coben and Dennis Lehane among many others — have made a recurring subject of children violated by predation, abandonment, neglect…

“At the same time, dramatic television routinely subjects children to gothic brutalities. “House” does nothing to spare them gruesome operations and heinous diseases. “Law and Order: SVU” plucks practically every other victim from the ranks of infants or 12-year-olds; the criminals are often still in high school. A glance at the episode summaries on the show’s Web site reveals entries like: “Detective Benson goes undercover as a Madame to investigate the murder of a child prodigy living a double life.” On “Medium,” a series about a psychic in the employ of the Phoenix district attorney’s office, children are hurt all the time.”

Partly this obsession arises from the sexual abuse of children which became evident by the 1980s, and the (distorted) impression given that such things happen “not so much in the wilderness of strangers and poorly vetted caregivers as it is within families, churches (Picoult’s book “A Perfect Match” deals with clerical sex abuse), schools and other narrowly circumscribed communities, in which insularity proves an ineffective mechanism of protection.”

Partly, also, one would think, from the new birth technologies and the weird bioethics that goes with them, justifying “saviour siblings”, eugenic abortions and wrongful birth suits. A morbid interest in medical drama also feeds into the trend.

Oddly enough, when one thinks of the role the law has played in abortion and the breakdown of the family, but according to Bellafante, Picoult “shares with various crime writers the idea that the law is the child’s greatest advocate. Often it is some representative of the legal universe who emerges to express the compassion families cannot.”

Child protection laws may be multiplying, but so is child abuse, including the most readily accepted kind -- divorce.

Bellafante seems a little sceptical of Picoult’s work, but in the end seems to buy into her dim view of parenthood:

“Picoult’s books and the whole cultural machine devoted to maniacal worry about children often seem like a reflection of our collectively sublimated ambivalence about having children to begin with. “Harvesting the Heart,” one of Picoult’s early novels, deals with this explicitly, imagining an overwhelmed young mother leaving her newborn. In so many of her books children seem like more work than most ordinary people can handle. If Picoult’s fiction means to say anything, it is that parenting undoes us perhaps more than it fulfills, and it makes a thousand little promises it can never keep.”

Watch MercatorNet for our review of the film.

From the country that brought you the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe -- television ads for condoms and abortion. Will the British government never get it? The more “harm reduction” they go in for, the worse the problem gets.

Friday last saw the end of a three-month consultation by the government’s broadcasting standards watchdog, the BCAP, on a proposal to allow abortion clinics to advertise on TV before 9pm. Condom ads, currently confined to one channel, would also be shown in the earlier time slot. Pro-life pregnancy counselling services could also advertise -- if they could afford it -- but would have to make it clear that they do not refer for abortion, “so that delays do not result in medical complications,” as one news report puts it. It would be too bad, wouldn't it, if women had time to think about what they were doing.

Already the morning after pill is advertised after 9pm on three channels. If the proposed broadcasting regime goes ahead it would be one of the most liberal in the world. The BCAP says it is responding to government calls for action to combat rising teenage pregnancy. Some doctors, at least, are against the move. The Mail on Sunday reports:

Dr Mark Pickering, a GP in York, said: ‘We know that TV is a powerful medium which gives young people messages that sex is fine, sex is great and they are not getting enough of it. It is full of beautiful young people jumping in and out of bed with each other. Allowing abortion services to advertise on TV would then be saying, “Here is a quick medical fix for the consequences of having sex.” That is giving all the wrong messages and is very disturbing.’

Dr Pickering said doctors at a meeting of the British Medical Association next Sunday would vote against it.

In a submission prepared by the Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales pointed out that abortion is still illegal in the UK unless it meets certain criteria and that advertising it like a consumer product would send a profoundly misleading message. It would further normalise an action that is the deliberate taking of an innocent human life, and would increase the number of abortions and sexual infections -- which the country is supposed to be trying to reduce.

“What is needed is the development and financing of a comprehensive programme aimed at reducing the abortion rate and promoting positive values of human life and relationships.”

Advertising condoms to those under 16 would contribute to the sexualization of children, raising legal as well as moral issues since the age of consent is still 16, the statement said. No evidence had been given for the claim that that it will combat teenage pregnancy and STI rates;in fact, the opposite may happen, as even those who support condom use admit to frustration when it comes to reducing STIs in practice.

“The analogy between condom promotion campaigns and promotion of “reduced risk” cigarettes may be instructive. Whereas young people are standardly advised to reduce risks of sex by using condoms, rather than abstain, health campaigns have tended to urge smokers to ‘quit’, rather than promoting ‘reduced risk’ cigarettes. One study found that “the unregulated promotion of “reduced risk” products threatens to undermine smoking cessation (which is proven to save lives), cause former smokers to resume their addiction, and even attract young people to tobacco products.”

The bishops’ statement concludes:

Our society is already failing young people by presenting an impoverished view of sex, too often entirely separated from any context of committed love and readiness for parenthood. It is very important that this process is not encouraged by a willingness to advertise services which have already done enormous damage to perceptions of sex in our society. In the many cases where respect for life, as well as sex and marriage, is at issue, the situation is still more serious, since not only the rights of young people are at stake, but those of any child they conceive. Respect for life, sex and parenthood are central to a healthy society, and advertising standards should reflect this.”

Let’s hope common sense if not moral sense prevails in the government. But with lords and baronesses pushing sexual pragmatism, the odds are stacked against it, one fears.

Inspiring words from the Commander-in-Chief during a young men’s barbecue at the White House on Friday. Students from local schools came to discuss the importance of fatherhood and taking personal responsibility with President Obama and other famous fathers.

Said the President:

And when fathers are absent -- when they abandon their responsibilities to their children -- we know the damage that that does to our families. Some of you know the statistics: Children who grow up without fathers are more likely to drop out of school and wind up in prison. They’re more likely to have substance abuse problems, run away from home, and become teenage parents themselves.

And I say this as someone who grew up without a father in my own life. I had a heroic mom and wonderful grandparents who helped raise me and my sister, and it's because of them that I'm able to stand here today. But despite all their extraordinary love and attention, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t feel my father's absence. That's something that leaves a hole in a child’s heart that a government can't fill.

He said his own father’s absence helped teach him to take responsibility and be a better father himself:

If we want our children to succeed in life, we need fathers to step up. We need fathers to understand that their work doesn’t end with conception -- that what truly makes a man a father is the ability to raise a child and invest in that child.

We need fathers to be involved in their kids’ lives not just when it’s easy -- not just during the afternoons in the park or at the zoo, when it’s all fun and games -- but when it’s hard, when young people are struggling, and there aren’t any quick fixes or easy answers, and that's when young people need compassion and patience, as well as a little bit of tough love…

I know that some of the young men who are here today might have their own concerns one day about being a dad. Some of you might be worried that if you didn’t have a father, then you don't know how to be one when your turn comes. Some of you might even use that as an excuse, and say, "Well, if my dad wasn’t around, why should I be?"

Let’s be clear: Just because your own father wasn’t there for you, that’s not an excuse for you to be absent also -- it’s all the more reason for you to be present. There’s no rule that says that you have to repeat your father’s mistakes. Just the opposite -- you have an obligation to break the cycle and to learn from those mistakes, and to rise up where your own fathers fell short and to do better than they did with your own children.

That’s what I’ve tried to do in my life. When my daughters were born, I made a pledge to them, and to myself, that I would do everything I could to give them some things I didn’t have. And I decided that if I could be one thing in life, it would be to be a good father. President Obama intends the event to be the start of a “national conversation” about the importance of fatherhood.

Right with you on that, Mr President.

If anybody doubted it, research by one of America’s leading journalism institutes confirms that the Internet is making inroads into family time. Members are dealing with each other less face-to-face, women in particular are tending to feel ignored at times, and parents worry that their children are spending too much time online.

The University of Southern California Annenberg Centre for the Digital Future surveys 2000 households each year to explore the influence of the Internet and online technology on Americans. The percentage of people who say they spend less time with household members since being connected to the Internet at home nearly tripled from 11 per cent in 2006 to 28 per cent in 2008. Time given to family socialising dropped sharply from an average of 26 hours per month (which seems little enough) dropped to just under 18 hours over the same period and reports of feeling ignored grew by 40 per cent.

There’s an obvious culprit for the rapid changes: the explosive growth of social networks. Higher income households seem to be suffering greater family time erosion (everyone with their own laptop?) and women are the ones who feel most ignored -- nearly half complain about that -- although almost 40 per cent of men do too.

Gilbert, an evolutionary psychologist who focuses on family and gender issues, thinks this may reflect the varying emphasis the sexes place on relationships, the balance women appear to maintain in their home computer use, or the persistent call of their other family and household responsibilities.

As for kids and teens, 28 per cent of respondents thought they spend too much time online -- up from 11 per cent in 2000.

All of this suggests increasing technological pressures on the family structure. American families have always been resilient, Gilbert points out, easily absorbing new technologies, from the telephone to television, and turning them to advantage. “But the Internet delivers an engrossing interactive universe into our homes and demands much greater individual commitment.” This can play havoc with our personal boundaries, he says.

“The family is our social foundation, society’s basic building block. We need to guard its health in what otherwise seems to be a boundless digital future.”

Guess who needs to lead the way in that task.

What is it about golf and fatherhood? Jack Nicklaus was the super dad (of five) of his day. A few years ago it New Zealand whiz-kid Michael Campbell who carried the torch for family life. Now it’s Tiger Woods, poster boy for Father’s Day as he delights in the recent expansion of his family.

“I couldn’t be happier than where I am right now,” Woods told reporters after his second child, Charlie, was born in February. “Having the two kids is just unbelievable, how much fun we are all having, except the sleepless nights -- that can be a little tough at times. But other than that, it’s just been incredible.”

He talks about cutting short his practices to be with Charlie when he wakes up from a nap. He speaks of missing his children terribly when he is on the road, the joy of teaching them things when he is home and the hilarity of seeing his stubbornness duplicated in his daughter. “She doesn’t like for me to help her hold a golf club,” he said. “She’ll figure it out herself.”

Woods’ himself was the child of his father’s second marriage; his first produced two sons and a daughter and he blamed his divorce on military obligations (he was an Army lieutenant colonel who served in Vietnam) that kept him away from home too much. He was retired by the time Tiger was born and was his full-time parent.

Woods expects that his wife, daughter and son will come to see him as he travels around the world to tournaments, and believes that seeing the world will be good for them. But the nine months he had to take off work recently because of an injury he described as an unexpected blessing, giving him the chance to bond with his daughter Sam Alexis, who is two.

“The best thing in the world was actually to watch her grow and, you know, each and every day have fun with that and teach her different things,” Woods said. “I really enjoy that type of life.” He added: “I love to teach, and to be able to teach Sam, and as soon as I can, start teaching Charlie a few things, that’s fun. I live to be able to do that.”

Life is so much better with kids than when he was just winning titles, he says. ~ Hat tip to Joe Atkinson.

A new breed of Japanese men is provoking a national debate about how the country’s economic stagnation since the early 1990s has altered men’s behaviour, and whether or not it is a bad thing. Known as soushoku danshi, or “grass-eating boys”, the young men in question are notable for their lack of interest in women and consumerism.

They like pottering around the house and going for walks. Some of them spend so much time playing computer games that they prefer the company of cyber women to the real thing.

“In this age of bromance and metrosexuals, why all the fuss?” asks Alexandra Harney, a regular commentator on Japanese television, in an article in Slate:

“The short answer is that grass-eating men are alarming because they are the nexus between two of the biggest challenges facing Japanese society: the declining birth rate and anaemic consumption. Herbivores represent an unspoken rebellion against many of the masculine, materialist values associated with Japan's 1980s bubble economy.”

Surveys suggest that among men in their 20s and 30s, between 40 per cent and 75 per cent consider themselves herbivores. They are more likely to want to spend time by themselves or with close friends; they are often close to their mothers and have female friends, but they're in no rush to get married themselves, according to Maki Fukasawa, the Japanese editor and columnist who coined the term in NB Online in 2006.

Shigeru Sakai of Media Shakers suggests that grass-eating men don't pursue women because they are bad at expressing themselves. He attributes their poor communication skills to the fact that many grew up without siblings in households where both parents worked.

“Because they had TVs, stereos and game consoles in their bedrooms, it became more common for them to shut themselves in their rooms when they got home and communicate less with their families, which left them with poor communication skills,’ he wrote in an e-mail. (Japan has rarely needed its men to have sex as much as it does now. Low birth rates, combined with a lack of immigration, have caused the country's population to shrink every year since 2005.)”

Changes in work have also played a part; the rise of the female executive has dampened macho office culture. More important has been the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble and the salarymen with a job for life who could afford to woo a woman with luxuries. Now, nearly 40 per cent of Japanese work in non-staff positions with much less job security.

"When the economy was good, Japanese men had only one lifestyle choice: They joined a company after they graduated from college, got married, bought a car, and regularly replaced it with a new one," says Fukasawa. "Men today simply can't live that stereotypical 'happy' life."

What about the gay factor?

Ms Fukusawa says that while some may be, the behaviour of the grass-eating men has more to do with rejecting the traditional Japanese definition of masculinity and what she calls the West’s commercialisation of relationships, under which men needed to be macho and purchase products to win a woman’s affection. She sees the new trend as positive and harking back to pre-World War II Japanese society.

Not surprisingly, there is talk of a new trend among women -- “carnivorous girls”, who are pursuing men more aggressively. Will they be the answer to Japan’s slide into a grey and sterile future?