Moms are binge drinking more, but they’re not the only ones: According to a study released Tuesday, binge drinking rates are on the rise for nearly all groups of Americans, whether they have children or not, NBC News reported.
“There had been a lot of media attention on the ‘mommy drinking phenomenon,’” said the study's lead author Sarah McKetta, a medical student and doctoral candidate at Columbia University.
But when McKetta took a closer look at the data on how women’s drinking habits have changed over a 12-year period, she found that the phenomenon “wasn’t substantiated.” From 2006 to 2018, the rate of binge drinking in women with children rose at about the same pace as women without children, McKetta and her colleagues reported Tuesday in PLOS Medicine. Binge drinking refers to four or more drinks at once for women, and five or men for men.
Overall, most age groups of both genders saw increases in binge drinking from 2006 to 2018, with the unhealthy behavior still more common among men than women.
