“…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.” This was the gist of a Time Magazine feature published in June 19, 2008. This article, written by John Cloud, became one of those most controversial under age drinking articles because it proposed that teenagers who drink with their parents are more likely to grow as responsible drinkers. (i)
Cloud began by pointing out that teenage drinking was considered a rite of passage until it became a grave public health issue because the U.S. seems to be in “one of its periodic alcohol panics” – this one focused on adolescents. In the past, there were alcohol panics focused on “frontier drinking” and “slum drinking” which provided the impetus for alcohol prohibitions and regulations.
Cloud reviewed all relevant statistics and concluded that while there are fewer young drinkers, a greater percentage of them are into binge drinking. He blamed the parents for this contradiction. “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–after all, not so long ago, they were themselves drinking as teens. A few of these parents have even allowed their kids to have big drunken parties at home.”
Thus, he proposed to parents to “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.”
To support his theory, Cloud provided the following arguments:
1. Two decades of prevention programs using an educational approach on the dangers of drinking didn’t work very well. Teen drinking rose after the period.
2. The next effort moved from education to environmental prevention — banning alcohol in public places or restricting alcohol licenses near schools. This made it hard for kids to obtain alcohol but as psychologist Stanton Peele writes in his 2007 book Addiction-Proof Your Child, “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.” Thus, we see the rise of binge drinkers.
3. The increase in binge drinking led to the formulation of “social host” laws, the most sweeping change in American alcohol-enforcement since Prohibition.
“Social-host laws make residents over 21 responsible for any underage drinking that occurs at their home. The laws vary, but those who break them can be fined, forced to pay for police costs that result from underage drinking or even jailed. Twenty-four states and more than 100 local jurisdictions have passed such laws, the majority of them in the past five years. Many of the laws make no allowance even for parents to drink with their own kids; of the 55 social-host laws passed by California jurisdictions, for instance, only 25 make exceptions for parents.”
Cloud found this problematic. Researchers, such as public-health professor Kristie Long Foley, examined whether adults’ approval or disapproval mattered when adolescents were deciding whether and how much to drink and found out that it does matter.
One predictable finding: “kids whose parents gave them alcohol for parties were more likely to binge-drink. That discovery underscored years of research showing that the earlier people start to drink, the more likely they are to become alcoholics.”
However, there was another finding that was more 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.”
Foley wrote in a 2004 Journal of Adolescent Health paper, “Drinking with parents appears to have a protective effect on general drinking trends.”
Cloud then cited several cases to prove his point. Today, three years after its publication, it remains as one of the best-written under age drinking articles because of its clear, perceptive, and practical view of dealing with the problem of teenage drinking.
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i. The Article in Time Magazine