no alcohol for under 15s

[southeastastra]

link bloody good idea imo. and i agree with bloke on tv who thinks it should be under 18s.

That may be why some people allow their children alcohol at home but it is not in our case. I don't let my son have occasional and moderate alcohol to stop him going off and getting shit faced outside the home !

I have let him have a small amount of wine with his meal on Sunday when he started asking out of curiosity around 11 or so I think.
What it introduced him to was the notion of a drink as an accompaniment to food and as a part of a meal.
He still does not drink outside the home as he has an abhorence of people being drunk and he is a fairly serious athlete and does not want the negative effects.
As he seems to have a very sensible attitude to alocohol it seems to be working.

I dislike fear based parenting and this is not what we are doing !

Ditto pagwatch - we allow DS (now 15) to have a small amount of alcohol at home, and have done for some years. We don't do it because we are scared he'll go out and do it anyway, but as an introduction to the idea that alcohol is something to be enjoyed in moderation in a pleasant social setting, not something which is forbidden, or done in order to get blotto.

agree with AMumInScotland - we do the same - a small amount of beer with food on occassion

Yes, I agree with LadyGlencoraPalliser.

But I really think it's a case of whether alcohol should be a 'normal' part of life. For some people (not me, I hasten to add) it is.

Teens drink an awful lot more nowadays, not just cider and lager but bottles of vodka before going out etc. It really is a massive problem. And I do know at least one late teen now who does have a massive drink problem and it's horrible to see.

I've got two older children, 20 and 22, and seeing the amount they and their contemporaries drink has really made me look at what I am going to do about my youngest DS. Neither of my older DCs have a problem, in fact DS1 is that interested most of the time, but when they all get together and drink, it's a lot.

If the alcohol is having an effect on their development, hitherto unknown, I would quite like to know about it.

Sorry to be a misery guts but that's what I think, and I really enjoy several glasses of white wine myself.

I think more of a problem is the relative affordability, and also the taste. When I was a teen I had very little cash, nobody I knew had much. We'd go out and make a half pint of cider last an hour! Everyone I knew drank cider, lager, or beer, because they couldn't afford wine or spirits. If you didn't like the taste, you could add a bit of lime or blackcurrant cordial. If you wanted to get pissed, your best option was a couple of pints of snakebite.

Now, teens seem to have far more available cash, and alcopops have made it sweet and fizzy and very easy to enjoy the taste.

The worst teenage drinkers I have ever encountered were:

a) teenagers in America where drinking under the age of 21 is illegal and stictly enforced. They were quite casual about their drug use, but hysterical at the idea of alcohol and did everything in their power to get hold of it.

b) Muslim teenagers, for whom it is forbitten on religious grounds.

Now this may just be the casual observation of someone who has spent the better part of their adult life working with teenagers, but I think there's an essential truth here. Banning something makes it attractive to someone going through a rebellious stage. Put it in a family setting and present it as a natural part of social life and the gloss is not so shiny.

Do you hear reports of gangs of drunken Italian or French teenage yobs?

It's an interesting question -- binge drinking isn't a problem in France or Italy, but levels of alcoholism are (IIRC) significantly higher in France or Italy than in the UK. Somewhere there is a balance to be struck, I think.

Slug (nice to see you around MN again, btw) is spot on about teen drinking in the USA. Could not be more illegal, could not be more commonplace (same as underage sex there, really).

I suppose for me this is all red-herring. I don't understand the appeal of binge-drinking, I do talk to DC about why a little bit of alcohol can make you feel relaxed/happy/less tired, but lots of alcohol doesn't make you feel more relaxed/happy/energetic; too much alcohol makes you feel diabolical the next day, in fact.

Is a lot of binge drinking a kind of egging each other on/showing off how much they can consume / how out of control they can get? Encouraging either less competition or competition on less self-destructive grounds might be the way to tackle this problem.

But binge-drinking IS becoming a problem in France, certainly, and has been in Spain for some time. So we can't hold up the French model as an example of excellence.

www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/27/foodanddrink.france

Yes, I think it is becoming a problem in France too. Isn't it known as the 'English' thing or something.

I agree we shouldn't be dictated to by the government but it is a really serious issue amongst teenagers. Most won't go on to drink heavily or have a problem, but just the general acceptance of drinking to the point of vomitting or whatever seems to have become the norm, whereas it used to be embarrassing or unacceptable.

Having stomach pumped or whatever used to happen occasionally amongst my peers when I was a teen, but now it happens all the time, girls collapsing all over the place, being taken to hospital having drunk the best part of a bottle of vodka. I know people can't imagine their child doing that, but they do.

Obviously stopping people giving their child a watered down glass of wine at Sunday lunch is going to have no effect whatsoever but it does draw attention to the wider problem that is prevalent and might make people think twice about introducing their children to alcohol at an early age.