DS (15) wants to take alcohol to a party - advice please

[LoveBeingAMum555]

Hi

DS is 15 and has never really shown any interest in drinking - so far. He has been invited to a party this weekend. The party is at the house of a nice family who have a quiet, well behaved daughter.

Everyone is taking alcohol to the party he says - and he can show me the facebook messages to prove it! I have said that I am not sending him off to this party with cans of cider/lager. He is only 15, I dont want to be responsible for him getting drunk at this party and if I do give him alcohol I dont know who else is going to end up drinking it.

But am I being too strict here? Would you be happy to let your 15 year old go to a party with alcohol? I am going to try and speak to another parent whose kids are going to this party but I need other opinions.

[Diamogs]

DS has been allowed to take a couple of bottles of cider etc to parties. Like others I would rather know that he is drinking low alcohol stuff rather than sneaking whatever he can find from somewhere / someone else - which is what I did as a teen.

A question for those who insist their DC won't be allowed to drink til they are 18 - given that they will shortly be heading off for Uni etc - aren't you concerned that they will be experiencing being drunk for the first few times / learning about their limits etc whilst they are living away from home, in unfamiliar surroundings and with new friends who possibly won't look out for them the same way that they would be if they were at a supervised house party with school friends, and then going home to their parents?

[Bolograph]

They aren't "crap studies" Bolograph, unless you are one of those flat Earth types who doesn't believe anything science has to say and the more elite the institution publishing the report, the more you distrust it as a grand conspiracy.

Quite the opposite. Cochrane collaboration and decent meta-analysis, me. Hence, "crap studies". They are retrospective, unblinded studies with small n, low p, obvious confounders, clear problems of homogeneity in the sample and and obvious idee fixee from the authors. What does "The brain is not fully developed until at least 25 years old Cointreau. This is now broadly accepted." even mean? "fully developed" in what sense? Accepted by whom?

The claim that the brain isn't fully developed until 25 comes from papers such as [1]. If you start from the position that anything involving MRI is likely to be looking at proxy measures and inherently challengeable, you won't go far wrong. I've read the paper, and I think it's not remotely capable of withstanding the weight you are putting on it. Read it, and tell me why I should regard your claims about "25" as sustainable.

I'll open with: it's a study measuring the size of a region of the brain. It also points out, in passing, that men's brains are on average 12% larger than women's. Do you think that men are 12% cleverer than women? No, I suspect you don't. So why do you think measuring small changes in the size of a region in the brain (substantially less than 12%, for example) implies anything about its function?

[1] Giedd, Jay N. "Structural magnetic resonance imaging of the adolescent brain." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1021.1 (2004): 77-85.

[80Kgirl]

Funny Bolograph you are here on mumsnet saying it's fine for teens to drink and you don't respect these studies, meanwhile hundreds of scientists are getting published in August journals saying it is. I am going to go with the weight of opinion from peer reviewed journals and highly respected international broadsheets rather than you an anonymous poster on the internet.

[meowli]

I never provided alcohol to my under age teenagers

Did they ever ask you to provide them with alcohol, MrsJayy? If they did, what was their response to your refusal, and either way, how do you know they weren't accessing it via other channels? I'm genuinely interested.

I remember the first time one of mine, at 15, asked tentatively whether I would get him a couple of Kopparbergs to take to a 'gathering', it provoked a real crisis of conscience in me! I knew a refusal from me wasn't going to result in him sitting around happily sipping apple juice. More likely he would get older acquaintances with i.d., or friends' siblings to get alcohol for him. I decided that, on balance, I would rather be onside, with a limited amount of alcohol provided by me, accompanied by plenty of dialogue around excess and the evils of drink (!), than force him into a corner of deceit and pretence every time he went to a party.

[MrsJayy]

No they never asked tbf and I wasn't stupid I knew DD 1 did drink on occasion but I just didn't think to give them wkds to take out the drink culture is big here like most places I guess and wasn't something I wanted to encourage

[motherinferior]

Which peer reviewed journals? Please name a meta-analysis, as Bolograph says, which demonstrates your point. Not just a piece in a broadsheet - that's going to be drawing on studies, but which studies? (I'm a health journalist. I do know about using Proper Sources.)

There may well be a meta-analysis but I'd like to know.

And I'd also like to know about the brain development stuff, because I write a fair bit on neurology and I'm not sure I've seen this effectively demonstrated.

[80Kgirl]

I'm doing my taxes. I'm not going to run along and get your a bunch of scientific articles you won't even read.

Feel free to help your kids get liquored up.

[motherinferior]

I can assure you I would read them. What with that being my job. I do feel, frankly, that if one is going to cite evidence - and 'hundreds of scientists' - one should have that to hand. That's all.

[Bolograph]

I'm not going to run along and get your a bunch of scientific articles you won't even read.

Oh, I'd read them. As with motherinferior, I read scientific papers for a living, and I have both objective and subjective ways to distinguish between good studies and bad ones. One might almost suspect that either (a) you haven't got the papers or (b) don't know how to distinguish good quality evidence from dross in a low-impact journal. Hint: n=200 MRI studies of proxy measures which assume size of brain structures equate to either development or function aren't going to convince anyway (including the authors, who don't make the claims they're accused of). Hint: n=200 retrospective studied of childhood behaviour won't convince anyone outside the readership of the sort of weak journals that publish them. This sort of research is hard, and just Googling (you weighted it for the impact factor of the journals, right, and checked the citation count?) for crap studies proves nothing.

You can find hundreds of papers, some in pretty decent journals, many written by teams at top research establishments, attesting to the reality of cold fusion. They're all crap. Every single one of them.

[Bolograph]

I am going to go with the weight of opinion from peer reviewed journals

Weight of opinion doesn't come from page-count. It comes from meta-analyses. All you need to do is find one that states that, say, early exposure to alcohol results in worse long-term health outcomes than later. One meta analysis is fine. The stuff the fMRI people crank out? Not so much.

Here's a proper grown-up meta-analysis of a related issue (not the one directly under discussion, but it's adjacent, and it's hard to see how studies wouldn't share the same problems).

Aspara, Jaakko and Tikkanen, Henrikki, A Methodological Critique of Alcohol and Addiction Researchers’ Studies on the Effect of Advertising on Adolescent Alcohol Consumption (December 13, 2013). Available at SSRN: ssrn.com/abstract=2205112 or dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2205112

Here's the abstract:

Considering restrictions on alcohol advertising, public policy-makers around the world cite a set of studies conducted by alcohol and addiction researchers on the effects of alcohol advertising on alcohol consumption. These studies suggest that advertising is a cause of increased alcohol consumption, especially among adolescents. The aim of the present article is to scrutinize the evidence of alcohol and addiction researchers vis-à-vis the scientific research standards routinely applied in marketing/consumer research. The authors assess both the strengths and weaknesses of the methodologies used in the focal studies. As a result of this assessment, the authors conclude that the evidence presented in the studies is not rigorous enough to establish any effect of alcohol advertising on adolescent alcohol consumption. The evidence is undermined by methodological problems, including exclusive use of the survey approach, reliance on self-reported subjective data, focus on the effects general media exposure and brand attitudes instead of advertising, and other validity challenges. It is concluded that bans on alcohol product advertising could even increase alcohol consumption, due to dynamic effects of marketing.

(my emphasis). This is the current state of proper, grown-up research. Feel free to throw "hundreds of papers" around: it's not my field so I'm happy to settle on gold-standard evidence.

And as to why fMRI work is to be treated with scepticism, read this poster:

Bennett, Craig M., M. B. Miller, and G. L. Wolford. "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction." Neuroimage 47.Suppl 1 (2009): S125.

[MrsJayy]

Is giving them a couple of weak beers or cider so they won't be left out and teased or so they are getting used to social situations how can you be sure the beer or cider isn't going to be followed by a litre of vodka or a bottle of strong cider

[FreckledLeopard]

DD is fifteen. The parties she goes to tend to have alcohol. She takes 4 or 6 Smirnoff Ices or similar and shares them with her friends. My rule is that I won't buy her spirits. If she wants to try and get fake ID and get vodka (like I used to at her age) then that's up to her, but I won't provide it.

A lot of her friends live in rural areas and there's not a lot to do there, so getting drunk at a party seems like fun. I hope that DD learns her limits, isn't ridiculously sick and doesn't go overboard. So far, thankfully, she's been fine. I know what I was like at that age - my friends and I used to drink regularly at parties and normally spirits.

I don't tend to ask the other kids' parents what the policy is re: alcohol. If they want to explicitly discuss it, then that's fine. Otherwise I'll go by what DD tells me (and from talking to other parents, they seem to do similar).

[claraschu]

Bolograph for those of us who aren't scientists, what do you think of the NYT article which 80Kgirl posted above? Is it interesting, well researched, unbiased?

I have 3 older teens and agree that scaremongering is unhelpful, as is being overly accepting. My mother was an alcoholic, and the whole issue makes me deeply anxious, but I try to walk a gracious middle path.

One thing I noticed is that, at our parties for teenagers, we provided small bottles of weak beer and most of the kids opened bottles and held them but didn't actually drink much. They like feeling cool holding bottles, but don't like the taste that much. A few got pretty drunk, but we were there keeping a close eye on everything; no harm came to anyone, unless their brains were invisibly damaged.

[meowli]

I only have purely anecdotal evidence provided by my own family, but in my experience, the boundaries were never pushed to that extent. I suppose they knew my slightly agonised and reluctant decision re: Kopparberg was unlikely to translate into me condoning or funding a large bottle of anything stronger. In other words, they knew they'd pushed me to my limit. I certainly didn't say "there you go, just let me know if you want any more" as I cheerily waved them off.

They could never have afforded to get someone else to buy it for them until they got jobs in 6th form. We never got the hang of pocket money or allowances.

I think that the expense of alcohol also means that teens are quite possessive over what drink they have, and don't generally go dispensing it with largesse to all and sundry. I think they tend to drink what they bring. (Or maybe mine are just tight!)

[Diamogs]

Yes IME it is drink what you bring, as when I have picked up from parties DS and his mates all come out clutching anything that they brought but didn't drink.

[Bolograph]

Bolograph for those of us who aren't scientists, what do you think of the NYT article which 80Kgirl posted above? Is it interesting, well researched, unbiased?

It's biased and wrong-headed. And it's an interesting educational project to figure out why.

Firstly, it cites no references. So all the claims it makes you have no way to check the methodology, the numbers, the statistical treatment, the limitations. It reduces research studies to one-line statements.

Consider, for example, the paragraph:

The same may hold true for hard-drinking teenagers. In 1998, Sandra Brown and Susan Tapert, clinical psychologists at the University of California, San Diego, and at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center there, found that 15-to-16-year-olds who said they had been drunk at least 100 times performed significantly more poorly than their matched nondrinking peers on tests of verbal and nonverbal memory.

Now what is referring to? Well, an opening guess would be [1] except (at a quick scan) (a) I can't find any reference to tests of verbal memory and (b) this is a study about adolescents admitted to state-level substance abuse programmes, and arguing from there to the general population (especially at n=166) is simply wrong. Widening the search and looking in other years, I suspect it's really a reference to [2], from 2000, which does match the summary. Except it doesn't really, and says nothing about the substantial limitations of the work:

Alcohol-dependent adolescents (n= 33) with over 100 lifetime alcohol episodes and without dependence on other substances were recruited from alcohol/drug abuse treatment facilities. Comparison (n= 24) adolescents had no histories of alcohol or drug problems and were matched to alcohol-dependent participants on age (15 to 16 years), gender, socioeconomic status, education, and family history of alcohol dependence. NP tests and psychosocial measures were administered to alcohol-dependent participants following 3 weeks of detoxification.

Matching of participants in a study at n=33 to n=24 is a joke. I take 24 kids from naice homes, and find as if by magic I can match them on family history and education to 33 kids from a substance abuse programme? Sure I can.

But that methodological quibble aside, we learn that being sufficiently much of an alcoholic by the age of 16 that you are in an alcohol abuse programme and require three weeks' detoxification is bad for you. So the results of the paper are not intuitively surprising. And that tells you what about drinking a couple of beers, exactly? What's the shape of the dose-response curve for alcohol in teenagers? Being an alcoholic is bad for you: we knew that. What does it tell you about social drinking? And the answer is: nothing.

That's the flaw in all these papers. They find that, unsurprisingly, heavy drinkers have poor health outcomes, and being scientists who want to get published, say nothing else. University PR departments then unwisely make them interpolate out of sample, to "well, if drinking a litre of vodka a day is bad for you, drinking a small Buck's Fizz alternate Christmases is as well". Well no: we have endless examples were dose-response in humans is wildly non-linear, where you body copes with small amounts with no damage, while excess is severely dangerous. The fatuous example would be water, but better would be paracetamol: if you took a paracetamol for your headache ones a month, it would have no ill effects on you at all. Fifty paracetamol will kill you. The dose-response curve is not linear.

Stuff like this:

In a 2002 e-mail survey of 772 Duke undergraduates, Dr. White and Dr. Swartzwelder found that 51 percent of those who drank at all had had at least one blackout in their drinking lifetimes; they reported an average of three blackouts apiece.

is just a joke. You publish crap like that in the New York Times because even the weakest journal would laugh at you. And they aren't doing research on human subjects anyway, which is they are reduced to nonsense self-recruiting retrospective studies; they are in-vivo animal testers [5]. What does this mean? They canvassed the undergraduates (7000 at Duke), got 772 responses, and of those that said they drank, all had blacked out. Suppose they got back 772 responses, 770 of whom never drank, and 2 drank to excess and had blacked out. That fits the summary, right? Without the numbers, we're nowhere: all we've got is "in 7000 people, a few of them drink to the point of unconsciousness". What, in a university? You're surprised? And they didn't see fit (so far as I can tell) to publish this anywhere, so all we're left with is an anecdote in a newspaper, based on a "study" not even worthy of the name. Big cheer.

Then the NYT article goes off into fMRI woo, and we lose the will to live. Journalists love fMRI: coloured pictures, big machines, strong claims. [3] [4]




[1] Brown, Sandra A., et al. "Psychometric evaluation of the Customary Drinking and Drug Use Record (CDDR): a measure of adolescent alcohol and drug involvement." Journal of studies on alcohol 59.4 (1998): 427-438.

[2] Brown, S. A., Tapert, S. F., Granholm, E. and Delis, D. C. (2000), Neurocognitive Functioning of Adolescents: Effects of Protracted Alcohol Use. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 24: 164–171. doi: 10.1111/j.1530-0277.2000.tb04586.x

[3] Diener, Ed. "Neuroimaging: Voodoo, new phrenology, or scientific breakthrough? Introduction to special section on fMRI." Perspectives on Psychological Science 5.6 (2010): 714-715.

[4] Whiteley, Louise. "Resisting the revelatory scanner? Critical engagements with fMRI in popular media." BioSocieties 7.3 (2012): 245-272.

[5] Obernier, Jennifer A., Aaron M. White, H. Scott Swartzwelder, and Fulton T. Crews. "Cognitive deficits and CNS damage after a 4-day binge ethanol exposure in rats." Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior 72, no. 3 (2002): 521-532.

[claraschu]

Thanks for the very interesting and detailed response. I guess science reporting is as crappy as we have all been warned.

[muddypuddled]

When I was 15/16 and going to a party where people were taking alcohol my mum would give me say 2 or 3 cans/bottles of low alcohol beer/lager/alchopop and say that I could go and drink as long as I only drank what she gave me and no more, accept nothing from anybody else. She would also pick me up from the parties so she would know if I had gone against our rule. It worked for us, a boundary was set and I didn't go against it because if I did I wouldn't be allowed it again. I think it set us up with some mutual respect and trust. It wasn't all the time though, special friend's birthdays and end of exam/school parties etc.

[whattodowiththepoo]

I was too afraid to ask my parents for alcohol at that age so I would have sourced it myself, it would have been better if I had someone encouraging me to be sensible.

[80Kgirl]

Okay, I am back, and can see that you are serious and I get your points.

What about the information in the NPR article? NPR is similar to radio4 in America. Again, as a lay person I would consider it a trusted source. They are saying that, "Over time, some of the kids started to drink, a few rather heavily — consuming four or five drinks per occasion, two or three times a month — classic binge drinking behavior in teens." To me, 8-15 drinks a month seems pretty heavy for light drinking and it really caught my attention. Previous to reading that, I wouldn't have thought much of an older teenager having this drinking profile. Are you saying, not to worry about the article, it's bunk, carry on as before?

[meowli]

Suppose they got back 772 responses, 770 of whom never drank, and 2 drank to excess and had blacked out. That fits the summary, right? Without the numbers, we're nowhere: all we've got is "in 7000 people, a few of them drink to the point of unconsciousness". What, in a university? You're surprised? And they didn't see fit (so far as I can tell) to publish this anywhere, so all we're left with is an anecdote in a newspaper, based on a "study" not even worthy of the name.

That's such a brilliant illustration of why you should never believe everything you read or hear, no matter how much pseudo-heavyweight 'survey, percentage, average' statistical gobbeldygook is being spouted. Could I just check something though? Please correct me , but wouldn't it take only one and a bit participants to have had a blackout, out of the 2 drinkers, to fit the 'statistics' as given?

[Bolograph]

I've fisked one article. Here is the paper upon which the NPR quote depends:

psycnet.apa.org/journals/adb/23/4/715/

Initiating moderate to heavy alcohol use predicts changes in neuropsychological functioning for adolescent girls and boys.
Squeglia, Lindsay M.; Spadoni, Andrea D.; Infante, M. Alejandra; Myers, Mark G.; Tapert, Susan F.
Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, Vol 23(4), Dec 2009, 715-722

You might need a university login to get the article, but you can see the abstract.

It's wildly weird n=76 work. It would never get ethical approval in the UK, and has bizarre exclusions (left handedness!) It assumes the only difference between adolescents who start to drink and those that don't is drinking. The graphs on page 719 are a joke, and the reviewers should never have let Figure 2 through (it uses ONE outlier to steer a line of best fit, without which their effect disappears); Figure 3 is almost as bad (again, the line of best fit is very weak, and no effect would be reasonable). There are no error bars on the trend lines. The splitting of already small groups into yet further groups by gender is sailing very close to the statistical wind.

I see no reason to take it seriously. It might mean something. It might not. But hey, you have read the papers and considered them, right?

[needacar]

If he's year 10 then no and I wouldn't have expected any booze to be brought to my daughters 15th.

If year 11 and nearly 16 then mahbe

[badabadabadabwee]

I am absolutely astonished that this seems to be a 100% "I would let him take alcohol". Absolutely astonished.

Were mine 15 and telling me about going to a party with alcohol it's simple - he wouldn't be going.

[Bolograph]

wouldn't it take only one and a bit participants to have had a blackout, out of the 2 drinkers, to fit the 'statistics' as given?

Yes. | skipped the 51% in my annoyance and read it as "all". It probably means 28/55 or something. Still, 28 out of 7000?

Averages which exclude all the zeroes are bogus. "The average number of victims for people that have killed is 1.1" tells us little about the average number of people everyone has killed is.