There are other opinions in this discussion that you can check out, but this one makes the most sense to me.
The Myth of How Europeans Drink
David Jernigan is an associate professor in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society and director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He has worked for the World Health Organization and the World Bank as an expert adviser on alcohol policies.
According to the Surgeon General, there are 5,000 deaths per year in the U.S. among young people under 21 as a result of alcohol use. No parent wants their child to have an alcohol problem, be involved in an alcohol-related crash or sexual assault, fall off a balcony during spring break, or suffer from alcohol poisoning.
Young people who start drinking before age 15 are five times more likely to develop alcohol problems.
Yet parents are strikingly ignorant of what the research literature suggests will be effective in keeping our children out of trouble with alcohol.
Many parents feel that young people will be safer if we keep them at home and supervise their drinking, or teach them to drink by having them drink with us. They shore up this conviction with a mental image of drinking patterns in European countries, where they assume that younger drinking ages and drinking with parents decreases youth drinking problems.
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In fact, the most recent research suggests that the opposite is true. Researchers followed 428 families in the Netherlands over a three-year period, and found that young people whose parents permitted drinking at home were more likely to drink more, to drink out of the home, and to develop alcohol problems over time.
A recent study of 1,388 young people and their parents in Chicago followed the children from ages 12 to 14, and found that those who reported at age 12 receiving alcohol from their parents at home were significantly more likely by age 14 to have been drunk or to have had five or more drinks at a time in the past two weeks.
Young people who start drinking before age 15 are five times more likely to develop alcohol problems. Keeping alcohol away from young people seems to have a clear result: it delays initiation of alcohol use.
This is what the comparison with Europe really shows: countries with higher drinking ages (like the U.S., Sweden, Norway and Iceland) have much lower prevalence of drinking in adolescence (measured in surveys of 15-16 year-olds that are comparable across countries) than countries with lower drinking ages. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2007 Call to Action to Prevent and Reduce Underage Drinking reported that in nearly all the European countries surveyed, young people engaged in binge drinking more often than in the U.S.
If providing alcohol to our children in the home is not the answer, what can parents do?
First, we need to look at our own drinking behavior, because children imitate the alcohol consumption of their parents. Second, we should support 21 as a sensible drinking age, given what we have learned from our national history and about adolescent brain development.
Third, we need to stay actively engaged with our children about alcohol use at least through the freshman year in college — research has shown both that the young people who were drinking in high school are the most likely to have alcohol problems in college, and that parental engagement is critical in helping young people make the transition from high school to college without getting into trouble with alcohol.
Today, alcohol companies spend at least $4 billion per year on marketing, much of it placed where young people are far more likely to see it than their parents. New products are more attractive to youth and more dangerous: “alcopops” are most popular with the youngest drinkers, and alcoholic energy drinks, which pre-mix alcohol with caffeine and other stimulants, create a high-risk population of wide-awake drunks.
The failure of alcohol taxes to keep up with inflation has made alcohol much more accessible to kids because it is now often cheaper than juice, soda or milk. Parents need to remember that today’s young people live in a far different world than they did, and protect them accordingly.
