TIME: Should You Drink with Your Kids? [View All]

Thursday, Jun. 19, 2008
Should You Drink with Your Kids?
By John Cloud/San Diego
TIME

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Ray DiCiccio is a well-tanned, mild, bespectacled 60-year-old who has served as executive director of the San Diego County Alcohol-Policy Panel since its founding in 1994. The organization is a county-funded nonprofit whose main mission is to reduce underage drinking, although in pursuit of that goal DiCiccio often fights for policies that restrict adult drinking as well... DiCiccio and his top deputy, Patty Drieslein, feel that the alcohol industry has become so powerful that American culture has turned into a binge-drinking culture... Like many other people in recovery, DiCiccio and Drieslein--and by extension the county organization they run--take an all-or-nothing approach to alcohol. The policy panel and many groups like it around the country now maintain that all kids should wait until they turn 21 before having their first drink. That may sound uncontroversial; after all, isn't underage drinking illegal? Actually, no. When Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act in 1984, it explicitly allowed kids to drink at home or in "private clubs or establishments." Similarly, under most state laws, it's legal for those under 21 to consume alcohol under certain conditions. Only six states, mostly rural ones, ban underage alcohol consumption completely.

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So in the '90s, DiCiccio and other alcohol officials around the country began to shift their focus from education to what is known as environmental prevention--banning alcohol in public places, for instance, or restricting alcohol licenses near schools. Prevention officials began working less with teachers and more with cops. 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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A few years ago, a team of North Carolina researchers, led by public-health professor Kristie Long Foley, examined whether adults' approval or disapproval mattered when adolescents were deciding whether and how much to drink. Foley's team analyzed surveys of more than 6,000 people ages 16 to 20 in 242 U.S. communities. 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. 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." How this approach would work in any individual case depends, obviously, on the kid and the parent. Peele, the addiction expert, raised his own daughter (who is 20 and will be a junior at New York University) to drink a "few sips" of alcohol at family meals until she was about 16, when she could have a full glass of whatever the adults were drinking. "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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Most social-host laws give police expansive powers. According to data compiled by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, an organization based in Calverton, Md., that studies alcohol policy, only eight of 67 U.S. jurisdictions with social-host laws require that the homeowner have "actual knowledge" of underage drinking at the house to be charged with a crime. In other words, you can violate most social-host laws even if you are in another country when your kid decides to party. And under many social-host laws, a meal with wine served at a dinner table is treated no differently from a kegger if neighbors are present with their kids. In short, we are encouraging kids to leave their homes (presumably by car) and drink in parks or abandoned warehouses or anywhere else they think they won't get caught and their parents won't get arrested... 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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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1816475,00.html