Time magazine has a great article about teen drinking and how to best teach kids to be responsible with alcohol. The article seems to conclude that it is better for teenagers to get some exposure to alcohol in a supervised setting before they are 21 years old. The recent hysteria over teen drinking has driven kids to drink in clandestine locations where they are less likely to get help if they get into trouble with alcohol. More and more are ending up in the emergency room because they have no experience with alcohol and no experienced person there to guide them.
Kansas MIP laws allow children 17 years of age to consume alcohol at home with their parent or legal guardian. This law is not well known. Given the “all or nothing” approach to alcohol that has been the trend in the last ten years, including a strong emphasis on making teen drinking a legal problem as opposed to a personal or family problem, most parents are mortified that they will be arrested or otherwise reported to the authorities for child abuse or something if they allow their child to drink, at all. Yet, as the article points out, you may be teaching your child some great lessons in responsibility by allowing limited alcohol use with the family. Alcohol is less likely to be seen as a means to rebel, or as some magic potion that will make you more mature, and kids that drink with their family generally tend to have less problems with alcohol. It certainly bears thinking about.
Here are some excerpts from the article:
So the data indicate there are fewer young drinkers, but a greater proportion of them are hard-core drinkers. Parents have helped create this paradox. Many parents seem torn between two competing impulses: officially, most say in surveys that they oppose any drinking by those under 21. But unofficially many also seem to think kids will be kids…
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But there is a better way. At first it sounds a little nutty, but you might consider drinking with your kids. Incongruously, the way to produce fewer problem drinkers is to create more drinkers overall–that is, to begin to create a culture in which alcohol is not an alluring risk but part of quotidian family life. Of course, that’s a mostly European approach to alcohol, but there’s reason to think it could work here. And it may be the best way to solve the binge-drinking problem.
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In a way, the new strategy worked: fewer kids drink now because it’s harder for them to obtain alcohol. But as psychologist Stanton Peele writes in his 2007 book Addiction-Proof Your Child (one of his 10 books on addiction), “When alcohol is presented as impossibly dangerous, it becomes alluring as a ‘forbidden fruit’ … The choice between abstinence and excess is not a good one to force on children.”
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there’s evidence that drinking with your kids–not buying them alcohol for a party but actually drinking with them at home–is a good way to teach responsible drinking behavior.
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But another result was surprising: if kids actually drank with their parents, they were about half as likely to say they had drunk alcohol in the past month and about one-third as likely to say they had had five or more drinks in a row in the previous two weeks. As Foley and her colleagues wrote in a 2004 Journal of Adolescent Health paper, “Drinking with parents appears to have a protective effect on general drinking trends.”
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You give them sips as smaller kids, and you don’t make a big deal about it,” says Peele, 62. “Around 16, give them a glass of wine. A second glass probably doesn’t make sense, but making hard-and-fast rules creates the sense that alcohol is some magical potion.”
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In other words, the social-host law appears to have broken up big house parties into many smaller ones. Possibly because fewer adults are present, the parties are less supervised, and more kids are getting so drunk they end up in the ER.
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Because alcohol is harder to obtain now than in the ’70s and ’80s, more kids are delaying their first drink. But most people will drink before 21, and it’s a reasonable goal for parents to be there when it happens. “What if a kid has never had alcohol and drinks for the first time at 21?” asks Peele, the author of Addiction-Proof Your Child. “If they haven’t developed a capacity to regulate themselves with alcohol at all, you can be headed for trouble.”