I don’t think there’s any doubt that Western societies in general have a very pro-alcohol attitude. We glamorize it in movies and television (I mean how many women started ordering “Cosmopolitans” because of Sex and the City?!). We sing along to lyrics about Gin and Juice, or Last Call for Alcohol. Mommy wine culture is a thing. We have a Bloody Marys in the morning, mimosas with brunch, we go for drinks after work, we have wine with dinner, we drink on the golf course, at baseball games, concerts…even movie theaters.

And unfortunately, we’ve come to expect that our teenagers will drink alcohol at some point. Many parents even see drinking as a rite of passage for teenagers - or at the very least, an unavoidable consequence of growing up today. It’s not so much that parents approve of underage drinking…but by now, given the society we live in, many feel almost helpless to stop it…so they get creative.

 

You’re listening to Speaking of Teens, a weekly show to help you better understand and parent your teen or tween.

I’m Ann Coleman, and after surviving a couple of difficult years with my teenage son, I decided to make the leap from practicing law into the science of parenting teens and tweens. I want to make sure you have the skills I was sorely lacking.

 

There are a lot of parents that make the decision, either deliberately or spontaneously, to allow their underage kids to drink alcohol. Perhaps it’s just a sip, one tiny drink or one beer, or a watered-down glass of wine - but it’s a pretty common practice. Between 30 and 50% of adolescents get their first taste of alcohol under parental supervision.

A Study conducted about 10 years ago in the US looked at the circumstances and the reasons that so many parents allow their kids to drink. Interestingly, and I think important to note – most of these parents, when they were first asked whether they allowed their teen to drink, said they didn’t think it was a good idea and that they didn’t condone it. But when pressed – when specifically asked whether there had been times when they allowed their teen to drink, a clearer picture emerged: a majority said there were exceptions to this no-drinking thing.

Many mentioned special occasions when they allowed their kids to drink - like a family wedding, special family party, a family vacation, a holiday celebration. For some it was a little champagne or a tiny glass of wine but for others, it was “drink what you want – you’re with us!” The reasoning behind the decision to allow their kids to drink under these different circumstances varied as well - and I believe this truly reflects parents of teens across the US and other countries.

Some parents just feel it’s not a big deal – “I grew up drinking with my parents – and I’m fine”. Some parents feel pressured to allow their kids to drink – pressure from other parents, from spouses. Many parents just feel a sense of helpless inevitability – “they’re going to drink anyway, so I’d rather it be with me in a safe environment where they’re not driving or going off with people”. Some have a fear that being overly strict about drinking would cause a disconnect with their kids or maybe cause them to rebel and even put them in danger, or just want to teach them about drinking responsibly rather than being out of control. they want them to appreciate the dangers and learn not to go overboard. They may feel if they take away the mystique – show their kids it’s not a big deal – that it doesn’t even taste good – they’ll be less intrigued. Some just want their kids to appreciate drinking as something to be enjoyed with a meal or as part of the family’s heritage and culture. There are parents that feel growing up in a house where drinking is the norm and where kids start early – will give them more of a ho-hum or…take it or leave it attitude about alcohol. Some want to teach their kids about alcohol before their friends get ahold of them and they go nuts. Parents may think it’s better teens drink before the go to college because they’re certainly going to drink there, and they don’t want them to not understand how to control it and go off the deep end with it once they start.

Let me just go ahead and make a blanket statement here so I won’t have to repeat myself over and over…I’ll put links and resources in the show notes for almost everything I mention in this episode – so don’t worry, I’ve got ya’ covered.

 

As proof that drinking young and with parents is the way to keep kids from developing a problem, people here in the US point to the many European countries where there’s often no minimum drinking age and teens and preteens drinking with family is the norm. They point out that teens in Europe just don’t have the out-of-control drinking issues that we do in the US, so obviously, drinking early and with parents is a good way to prevent alcohol misuse in our kids.

If you allow your teen or tween a sip of alcohol now and then or you let them have a full drink or a beer or let them go nuts as long as they’re at home…listen up – we’re going to look at the science and stop making assumptions.

Let’s start by looking at this idea that teens in Europe are more responsible with alcohol because of the culture, drinking with family and starting drinking at an earlier age.

You know, I had no idea – never really had a reason to think about it – but I had no idea there were only about 14 countries in the world where the minimum legal drinking age is 21. There are almost 3 times as many countries where the minimum age is 18. On the other hand, there are tons of countries where there is literally no minimum legal age requirement to drink alcohol…(although most have a legal limit of 18 to purchase).

And among all these countries where there’s no minimum legal age to drink, are European countries like France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. These are some of the countries we in the US see as having a close cultural relationship with drinking…and a much more relaxed attitude about the age at which kids begin drinking. And, as I said, there are many parents in the US (maybe you) that often refer to these countries as an example of what we should be doing in the states…because those kids don’t have a problem with drinking like ours do.

Where did we get this idea? There were a handful of studies that were done between the late 1990s to the mid-2000s that looked at what they called “drinking with parents” or “DWP”, and these studies appeared at the time to show that parents who allow children to drink with them help the kid learn to drink responsibly so that it doesn’t become a problem for them.

Well, first, in the past few years, these studies have been called into question - it appears they were structured in a way that biased the findings in favor of the opinion that teenagers can learn to drink more responsibly by drinking with their parents.

But in 2007, before these studies were shown as questionable, a fellow by the name of Stanton Peel came out with a book called “Addiction Proof Your Child” And in that book, he argued the same thing - that parents should allow children to drink with them to help the kid learn to drink responsibly - because that’s what they do in Europe and look how great it works for them.

In full disclosure, I’ve not read the book, but I did find a blog post of his from 2008 where he says “Let's look at Europe for a moment. Not all European societies have less alcohol abuse than Americans. Only some do. The World Health Organization survey, Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children, found these countries had the lowest incidence of drunkenness among 15-year-olds: Macedonia, Israel, France, Italy, Greece, Malta (is that even a real country?), Portugal, Spain - all of which ranked lower than the United States.”

So, for the heck of it, I found the information made available online from WHO’s Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children reports. The table I found shows the result of a single question posed to 11-, 13- and 15-year-old kids: “have you ever had so much alcohol that you were ‘really drunk’?” (a pretty technical question, huh?)

The possible answers were NO, Yes and more than 10 times. They gave the percentages for each age, by sex, for each of the countries in the survey (not all European countries by the way).

Now, I assume this is the question Stanton Peele was referring to when he said, this report found these countries had the “lowest incidence of drunkenness among 15-year-olds, all of which were lower than the US”.

Stanton’s book was published in 2007, he wrote this blog post in 2008, so he had to be looking at the data from this report for 2006 (there weren’t even any reports in 07 or 08).

So, when I looked at the specific handful of countries he mentioned     in the blog post as having the lowest incidence of drunkenness for 15-year-olds, for the most part, he was correct.

But again, these numbers are from 2006, and the most recent Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children report came out in 2010 (which is still 12 years ago!) after the blog post and after his book (and after all sorts of publicity this book received) The 2010 report shows most all of the European countries he mentioned going up, above the US.

Even more data is available in a study published in 2015 that examined adolescent drinking trends in 28 European and North American countries during the period from 2002 to 2010 reported in the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC). Specifically, the 11-, 13- and 15-year-old students were asked how often they drank beer, wine and liquor with possible answers ranging from never to every day.

The US weekly use percentages were lower than all countries other than Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Portugal. US numbers were significantly lower than Italy, Germany, France, Austria, Greece.

Just for good measure (and because I’m just really curious) I also took a hard look at the 2019 European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (the ESPA) which includes data gathered from around 100,000 kids ages 15 and 16 from 35 European countries.

I compared this data to the same data points from the US, reported in the 2019 Monitoring the Future (or the MTF) survey conducted by the University of Michigan and funded by the National Institutes of Health – (the ESPA models it’s survey questions after the MTF so they’re easily compared.)

And just FYI - There are reports from MTF for 2020 and 2021 as well (they’ve been doing this for almost 50 years), but 2019 was the last report from the ESPA – from Europe – so just to make sure we’re comparing apples to apples, I used the MTF 2019 data…

So, let me preface this 2019 comparison by saying the US numbers increased in 2020 pretty significantly and then came back down in 2021 to numbers below 2019.

So, the 2019 numbers I mention today for the US are higher than the most recently reported numbers in the US…but I’m assuming that has something to do with the pandemic, which means it’s likely the European numbers would have skewed in the same direction both years too. The pandemic screwed with everything!

So, here’s what I discovered:

When questioned as to whether they’d had alcohol in the past 30 days, 35% of the kids surveyed in Europe had and by comparison, 18.4% of kids in the US had (now, that’s not really a surprise since we’ve already said that we know more kids drink in Europe with their families). So, almost TWICE as many teens in Europe have been drinking in the past 30 says.

And the trend is the same when we look at the percentage of 15 and 16-year-olds that have ever had a drink of alcohol – about TWICE as many in Europe as the US – 79% to 43.1%. But the numbers are a bit closer when it comes to kids having had their first alcoholic drink before the age of 13: 33% in Europe and 24.5% in the US and significantly, (I think)…of that 33% of kids in Europe that had a drink before the age of 13, roughly 7% had been intoxicated before 13. I couldn’t find those numbers for kids in the US, however.

And here are the numbers that should really get your attention: 34% of kids in Europe had binged on alcohol in the past 30 days. Binging is considered 5 or more drinks in a row, at one time. In the US, that number is 8.5%. That means 4 times the number of kids in Europe drank 5 or more drinks in a row in the last 30 days - that’s some serious drinking.

So, the bottom line is, in Europe where there’s no minimum drinking age and culturally, adolescents are allowed to drink at an earlier age with parents, any notion that these factors lower the risk of alcohol abuse should be put out of your head - it’s simply not supported by the evidence – in fact, the evidence shows just the opposite is true. So, we shouldn’t hang our hat there if we decide to let our teens drink.

Let’s look at some of these other assumptions like letting them drink at home or with family where they’re safe, teaches them to be more responsible or it that it doesn’t really hurt anything or it keeps them from abusing it later by taking away the big mystery or the seduction of it, or that it’s inevitable so if we’re too strict about it they’ll just rebel.

Well, for one thing, we already know just by looking at these statistics in Europe that letting kids drink earlier, with family, does not prevent them from abusing alcohol later and in fact appears to increase drinking frequency and binge drinking. But let’s look at the scientific findings from various other studies, surveys, and reports. Statistically, 41% of people who had their first drink by age 12, developed an alcohol use disorder that stayed with them throughout their life. But only 18% of those who wait to drink until they’re 18 develop an issue and if that first drink came at age 21, only 11% developed a problem. The obvious conclusion is the longer we put off that first sip of alcohol, the less likely our kids will have an alcohol problem.

The reason for this is pretty simple and I’ve discussed it before in episode #4. The brain’s prefrontal cortex is still developing until at least the mid 20’s. This part of the brain is responsible for executive functions like self-control and decision making and the synapses (the point where the brain cells communicated with one another) are being strengthened based on what the adolescent experiences. In other words, the brain gets better at whatever it is the adolescent spends time doing and once the brain strengthens in that area, it’s much harder to reverse or stop doing it.

And the reward system – the brain’s system that focuses on pleasurable experiences and motivates a person to jump all over them and then keep going, it’s in hyperdrive during adolescence, which makes it even harder for them not to do something risky that looks or sounds like a lot of fun - especially when they’re with or in front of their peers.

So, this combination of a weak prefrontal cortex and a ramped-up reward system means that adolescents are driven to do pleasurable but risky things like drink alcohol, vape, smoke weed. They don’t have the self-control and the good decision-making skills to control it like an adult does (no matter how well they understand the dangers). And once their brain gets a taste of it, and those synapses start strengthening for that activity it’s much harder for them to stop and much more likely they will have a lifelong problem.

Numerous well-known, widely accepted, peer-reviewed, published scientific studies have shown over and over that the younger someone begins indulging in any addictive substance, the more likely they will become addicted and will have a lifelong issue with that substance.

A study published in 2018 that examined 6 years of data collected regarding adolescents who were given alcohol by their parents determined this practice did not keep those kids from having drinking problems and in fact, increased the risk for binge drinking, alcohol use disorder and other alcohol-related issues like accidents. A study completed just the year before kept tabs on kids for 7 years and reached the same conclusions. They looked at kids of parents who provided them tastes or sips of alcohol before age 13 and found that by age 20, these kids had increased the frequency and quantity of the alcohol they consumed in addition to other alcohol-related issues.

It's also been shown that kids who receive their first sips of alcohol at home or with parents, tend to then associate with other kids who drink alcohol early. And according to the 2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 70% of underage drinkers said they were drinking with more than one other person the last time they drank.

I could go through numerous studies that indicate the same thing, over and over. Providing adolescents with alcohol at home is not going to keep them from abusing alcohol, it’s not going to take away the mystique, it’s not going to make drinking seem routine or less exciting ,it’s not going to keep them from drinking outside the home with other kids who drink. Unfortunately, you cannot teach them “responsible drinking” this way.

And, by the way, it’s not only providing kids with alcohol that increases the likelihood they’ll misuse alcohol – if you drink, if you appear to have a lax attitude about them and their peers drinking, thinking of it as a rite of passage, keeping alcohol in the home - all those factors increase their risk as well - kids who perceive their parents as having a permissive attitude about drinking are more likely to abuse alcohol and other drugs

On the other hand, studies have shown that having strict rules against your kids drinking alcohol does not lead to rebellion and misuse of alcohol and in fact, that parental restrictions decrease the risk that kids will have an issue with drinking. Having set boundaries about drinking alcohol and enforcing them with logical consequences when they mess up, if done properly, can make an enormous difference.

If you’re worried about this, listen to episode #1 where I discuss being controlling, authoritarian and using punishments as opposed to discipline.

So, the data doesn’t lie. Perhaps your kid would be the one who somehow is able to fight against neurobiology and not develop a problem if allowed to drink, but are you willing to take that risk?

I know, this begs the question, what should I do (other than setting and enforcing boundaries) to help keep my kid from going crazy with alcohol?

In 2017 an Australian study looked at 131 longitudinal studies (those that examined a number of adolescents over a period of years) and evaluated 12 different parenting factors as they related to alcohol misuse in adolescents. As far as the negative impact - they of course, found the same as the other studies I’ve mentioned. But they also determined, that supervising and monitoring your adolescent’s activities, having a quality relationship with them, communicating well, being supportive and being very involved with their life, all have a positive impact on keeping kids from developing an issue with alcohol.

Maintaining a close connection with your kid throughout adolescence, treating them with respect, granting them autonomy and listening to their opinion, using an authoritative parenting style, emotion coaching, positive discipline, finding your own emotional balance, making sure your kid knows they can tell you anything and you won’t freak out on them, that you’ll listen until you get it, that nothing they can do will make you stop loving them – these are the things that assure you’re influence in your child’s life…that will make your kid want to listen to you.

So, forget giving your kid alcohol to teach them about it or to somehow keep them from it, and focus on keeping them away from it as much as possible for as long as possible. Their likelihood of having a problem with it decreases every year they wait.

Check your attitude about teens drinking alcohol being accepted or inevitable, consider not keeping it in your home, or at least locking it up and not drinking it around them.

I know, it may be asking a lot, but look at what we’re talking about here, your child’s health and safety, long-term. Is it worth a few years of only drinking when you’re out with friends and not around your kids? Or maybe at least waiting until they’re in bed – keeping it locked up. The pull is really great at this age, don’t make it easy for them

And talk to them about the rules. Agree on the consequences for breaking them. Stay connected, involved, supportive and let them know you’re there for them – always.

A final note about furnishing alcohol to your kid – besides the ramifications regarding your teen’s misuse of alcohol, there could be civil and criminal liability as well.

In next week’s episode I’ll discuss these liability issues, your kid’s friends, house parties and more.

 

Speaking of Teens is the official podcast of neurogility.com, an organization I started to educate other moms and adolescents about emotional intelligence.

Go to neurogility.com and click the free resources tab to find all our free parenting guides and e-books to help you learn more about your teen and how to parent them in a way that increases their emotional well-being and keeps them safe.

You can also go to neurogility.com/11 for this episode’s show notes and transcript.

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