Underage Drinking In Campus Culture

There were certain behaviors that Toren exhibited that I did not find to be very unusually in a campus culture. The main one being underage drinking, it is an unspoken rule that it is okay to drink before we are twenty-on. A lot of Toren’s drinking occurred in his dorm room, on the rule that what happens behind closed-door stays behind closed doors. “I drank throughout the next two days until I had return from Brazil back to my site and we parted ways (pg. 177).” He had frequently black outs, long periods of drinking and extreme cravings to keep drinking. I found the section where Toren discusses that he had great grades despite getting extremely drunk the night before proved that he could play hard and work even harder. It is not hard to …show more content…
Reading both Chris and Toren’s point of view, I find that Toren was predisposed well before college. Chris admitted that she has more than two drinks a week, she tells the readers that in her own younger days she experimented with alcohol and that it was part of her culture. Although, her children were not fully aware of her past, as an adult she did enjoy a glass of wine with her meal or a drink down by the docks. In our society, this would be described as social drinking, even healthy by some. However, parental influence does not stop a parents own drinking, but how they teach their children about alcohol. Some parents teach their children about the full effects of drinking alcohol, the consequence that comes with alcohol and the safe ways to consume alcohol. Then there are other parents that tell their children not to drink because it is bad for them, there is no explanation, they assume that should know the full affects. The way Chris and Dan explain the way that they raised their children and then their explanation about their children’s experiences with alcohol during high school; although they were fully aware of what alcohol is and what it does, they still got involve with it. Most individuals that drink do not take their first drink outside the home, but rather they get it from the alcohol that their parents keep in the home. Therefore, if the drink is accessible to the teen, then it becomes a principal factor in heavy-high-risk drinking. Chris further explains in chapter eighteen that her sons would often go with friends when they were home from college to a local brewery where they could see beer being made and buy. To her this was acceptable, however not a lot of parents would agree with this type of