R-rated movies don’t cause early drinking; alcoholic parents do.
“Middle-schoolers who are forbidden to watch R-rated movies are less likely to start drinking than peers whose parents are more lenient about such films.”
So found researchers at Dartmouth Medical School, reporting that among those whose parents let them watch R-rated movies “all the time,” almost a quarter had drank without their parents’ knowledge. Only 3% had tried a drink among those “never allowed” to watch R-rated movies. While the researchers controlled for parenting style, there was nothing said about the parents’ level of alcohol use and alcoholism.
Aligning cause and effect between movies and drinking ignores the fact that the less disciplined a child, the greater the likelihood that a parent is an alcohol or other-drug addict (“out of control children” is clue # 10 in the chapter “Poor Judgment” in How to Spot Hidden Alcoholics). Since the odds of a child inheriting the biochemistry of addiction from an addicted parent are some four times the odds of inheriting addiction from a non-addicted parent, the same child is far more likely to be allowed to do things children of “normal” parents are not. This includes watching R-rated movies and TV shows, listening to the “wrong” kind of music, playing R-rated video games and having sex at an earlier age. They also have greater access to the drug than children of non-alcoholics, since the hooch is more likely readily available at home. So, they begin drinking earlier. The R-rated films have nothing to do with cause; they are a coinciding indicator of early drinking and likely early onset of alcoholism.