In a recent post, Paul Dillon discussed the provision of alcohol to minors. A young reader named Kate responded to the article with a very well considered and thought provoking question:

I am a 17 year-old girl going on 18 and I have been to parties where alcohol has been served and there have been a number of parents around making sure that the minors don’t drink too much.
There have been other parties that I have gone to where everyone is over the age of 18 and their drinking yet none of them are drunk until about midnight.
What I would like to know is how you would handle underage drinkers and what you would do to “stop” minors from drinking before the legal age?
I would like you to remember the first time you had alcohol and how old you were, then tell me that putting the drinking up to say 21 years old is going to stop these people from drinking, you mustn’t be thinking right.
It is all well and good that there are all these arguments about drinking and at the age of 16 the brain is at a critical time and of cause everyone knows the laws about drinking in their own states. However, has anyone considered teaching kids at school about alcohol and how to drink it responsibly? They haven’t and you want to know why kids drink at 16. Well maybe we “kids” should be taught how to have a good time and not drink so much that we get smashed.
I think there are some “kids” out there that have had some alcohol at family events and as they grow older they understand that it’s okay to drink a little but at the same time you don’t need to get drunk to have a good time.
Although some people just like to get drunk because maybe that’s how they deal with things or that’s how they think they will have a good time and in the morning they’re the ones who will wake up with a massive hang over and not remember much about the night before.
So when you say that parents shouldn’t give alcohol to minors, you think about those other kids who have been taught how to drink a little but also have a good time because instead of being taught at school they were taught by their parents.
So unless you have some way of teaching kids about alcohol and how to drink it responsibly, you really aren’t doing much now are you?

Kate raised a very interesting and important question to which Paul Dillon has written a response.

Hi Kate

Thanks for your comments and your views on this extremely controversial topic. The issue of ‘underage drinking’ is not a new one but in recent times it has received a phenomenal amount of attention and everyone seems to have something to say about it …. From what I can tell from your comments, you believe that if we ‘taught’ young people to drink responsibly many of the problems that we currently see represented in the media would not exist. Here are my thoughts on that matter …

It has only been in recent years that we have started to talk about ‘teaching’ young people to drink responsibly. In the past no-one ever thought about teaching their children to drink – it was never even considered. Some parents introduced their children to alcohol with dinner and others occasionally gave their children a drink on special occasions, but no-one ever taught young people to drink. They learnt drinking behaviour by watching the adults around them. Drinking alcohol was seen as an ‘adult activity’ and it was rare to see an adult give a child alcohol.

Research shows quite clearly that the earlier a young person starts drinking the more problems they will have with alcohol in the future. There is no research that shows that ‘teaching’ a young person to drink will mean they will drink more responsibly. On the contrary, Australian research has shown that even those young people who were introduced to alcohol with a meal by their parents were found to be at more risk of having alcohol problems in the future than those young people who didn’t drink at all.

I don’t think there are any easy answers here – but the evidence is quite clear that if we want to keep our young people as safe as we can  – the best thing to do is to try to delay them drinking alcohol for as long as possible. Of course this is going to be difficult and some young people are going to go behind their parents’ backs and drink anyway. But are all of these teenagers going to go and get smashed simply because their parents wouldn’t let them have a drink? Absolutely not …. anyone who believes this has a very low opinion of Australian teenagers. However, this belief that if a parent says ‘yes’ to their child when it comes to drinking alcohol it will mean that they will drink more sensibly does not wash with me ….

I will stress again – we do not need to ‘teach’ our young people to drink responsibly – they learn by watching adults around them – this means that we have to model good behaviour. Unfortunately, we do not do this very well and as a result we are seeing some of our young people drinking in a very risky way!

Thanks again for your comment

Paul Dillon

Featuring Paul Dillon, Generation Next speaker and drug and alcohol expert. Editor Dr Ramesh Manocha.