In Germany and Italy, restaurants can sell alcohol to teenagers aged 16 and older. Many French children drink wine with dinner starting at an early age, and in the United Kingdom, parents can legally give alcohol to children aged 5 and older. But what Some US parents who try to follow this European example believe that this relaxed attitude toward alcohol will discourage alcohol abuse later in life, but in fact, it can do just the opposite.
New research suggests that introducing a child to alcohol earlier in life may increase the likelihood that he or she will binge drink in college. At this year’s meeting of the Society for Prevention Research, researcher Caitlin Abar of the Prevention Research and Methodology Center at Pennsylvania State University said that there is no scientific evidence to support the belief that prohibiting alcohol turns it into a “forbidden fruit” and encourages abuse. Abar suggests that parents practice a zero-tolerance policy in the home.
Parents can legally serve alcohol to their own children in 31 US states. Although US teenagers drink less often than adults, they tend to drink more at a time (on average, five drinks in a sitting) according to Ralph Hingson of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. About 87 percent of college students try alcohol and 40 percent regularly engage in some type of binge drinking.
In an effort to see whether the prohibition of alcohol by parents might be a cause of binge drinking, Abar surveyed almost 300 college freshmen and compared their drinking habits to their parents’ attitudes toward alcohol. The students whose parents never allowed them to drink—about 50 percent of the group—were significantly less likely to binge drink in college, regardless of gender.
“The greater number of drinks that a parent had set as a limit for the teens, the more often they drank and got drunk in college,” Abar said. Whether the parents drank themselves has little effect on their children’s behaviors.
Abar also said that further research is necessary to confirm the preliminary study. She did not separate students who specifically drank with their parents at meals from those whose parents allowed their children to drink both inside and outside the house.
A 2004 study by Kristie Foley of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina showed that teenagers who received alcohol from their parents for parties were up to three times more likely to binge drink within a month, whereas those who drank only with the family were less likely to binge drink. This suggests that the context in which the parent provides alcohol is important.
Alexander Wagenaar, a social epidemiologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who has charted the effects of raising the drinking age for nearly three decades, pointed out that Abar’s sample of college students is not representative of the entire US population because the group was composed almost entirely of white students who lived on campus. He finds the data convincing, though, because previous research discovered a similar effect in low-income African-American and Hispanic students.
In addition, a 2007 study of 1,388 children by Kelli Komro of the University of Florida showed that schoolchildren who were permitted alcohol in the home by their parents in sixth grade were up to three times more likely to get drunk and almost twice as likely to drink heavily at ages 12-14.
Finally, researcher Margaret Kerr of Orebro University in Sweden said that she and her colleagues have designed a no-drinking intervention program that cut teen drunkenness by 35 percent in a pilot study published earlier this year. This further suggests that prohibiting alcohol in the home can decrease binge drinking later in life.
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