I'd always assumed that introducing kids to alcohol in the home, rather than trying to enforce our society's ridiculously draconian restrictions on teen drinking, made adolescents less prone to really stupid booze-related behavior. But it's good to have some cold hard statistical proof.
« Why We Fight? | Main | Your Semi-Regular Scottish Independence Update » The Family That Drinks Together ...04 Sep 2007 04:27 pm Comments (6)
I know lots of people, middle-aged and elderly, who have never drunk alcohol in their lives. They, and I, am glad their parents didn't introduce them to the stuff. How are the restrictions 'ridiculously draconian'? They often aren't even enforced! You may have guessed that I grew up in a 'sheltered' atmosphere which stigmatized drinking. Nonetheless, I have had scores of drinks in my life. Once, I got drunk enough on New Year's to vomit. Anthony Keidis (sp?), lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers was exposed by his parents to drugs and alcohol in his pre-teen years, and has spent a lifetime struggling with addiciton. I can't imagine that the average kid whose parents told them drinking was a normal part of high-school have a better record of binging than I have had. I'm interested in deeper details. What about parents who themselves openly drank, but didn't let their teens drink? Were they included in the same category as dry parents who lived their principles as an example for their children? Or parents who have a 'because i say so' approach as opposed to those who talk about why alcohol is forbidden in a persuasive/didactic manner? These are factors for which it's difficult to control, but they allow me to feel that I won't be endangering my child by omitting to get them drinking. 
There are big genetic differences in propensity toward alcoholism based on how many generations ago your ancestors began having to deal with alcohol. Natural selection has had a lot longer to weed the village drunks out of the gene pool in Mediterranean cultures than in the rest of the world. Thus, in the U.S., Jews and Italians have much lower alcoholism rates than Northern Europeans or blacks, while American Indians and Eskimos have tragically high rates. In general, hunter-gatherers whose ancestors weren't exposed to alcohol until a few generations ago have big problems, with Australian Aborigines being perhaps the most tragic example. Even relatively successful and assimilated hunter-gatherers like the Maori who otherwise are doing fairly well in New Zealand, tend to have terrible alcohol problems. What this means for statistical studies is that the Americans from Mediterranean cultures where everybody drinks a little wine with meals and children are allowed to drink a little diluted wine on holidays are simply not comparable to Americans from, say, Southern Baptist or Irish cultures where lots of people are teetotalers because, rationally, they fear they'd lose self-control if they started drinking.
Hey Ross, what's so "ridiculously draconian about your teen drinking laws. According to Professor David Shaffer, of Columbia University, when you guys raised the drinking age from 18 to 21, accidents dropped dramatically, and suicides dropped by seven per cent, which is not huge, but not peanuts either. In Ireland, we have legal drinking at 18, but it starts way, way earlier. 15 years binge drinking is common. We have a real problem on our hands. It seems to me that raising the drinking age doesn't stop teen drinking. But it should decrease the lower age teen drinking rate. Think of it this way. You're 16-17. You need ID to buy drink. At that age, you're more likely to pass for 18, and you have buddies who are 15. Or to put it another way, 18 year olds who can buy drinks legally are more likely to have friends who are 16-17. Therefore, it is actually quite easy for 16-17 year olds to obtain and abuse alcohol. If the age limit is 21, that becomes much harder. It is then a "scandal" if President Bush's 18 and 19 year old daughters are caught drinking alcohol. The standards are simply much higher. It's plain old conservative common sense, not "ridiculously draconian". I'd rather have draconian anti-teen drinking laws than an epidemic of alcoholism because a significant part of the age cohort between 14-17 abused alcohol on a regular basis. But, hey, maybe I'm just a crazy, statist European.
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It's always the most sheltered kids who end up drinking themselves to death when they get to college. Personally I started smoking weed at 13, so I had the idea upbringing.
Posted by Freddie | September 4, 2007 8:16 PM