Sometimes it seems like parents today can’t win. Everywhere they look—from mommy blogs to Huff Post Parenting articles—there’s a new expert recommendation on how to parent kids so they don’t turn into drug addicts, assholes or delinquents. When it comes to shielding kids from alcohol abuse, there are conflicting views as to whether allowing them to try some liquor early on versus forbidding it altogether is an effective strategy. A new study out of Australia supports both claims.
Damned if You Do and Damned if You Don’t
The study’s findings recently hit the Cambridge University Press in their Psychological Medicine Journal. In the story, researchers studied 1,927 kids in Australian cities between 2010 and 2014, charting the youths’ drinking habits while also taking score of the parents’ interaction with their kids. The data shows that kids who were introduced to alcohol by their parents were three times less likely to binge drink than those who were introduced to it by their friends. The flip side is that those introduced to alcohol earlier ended up drinking more regularly than those who weren’t introduced to it through their parents.
“Parental supply of alcohol to adolescents was associated with increased risk of drinking, but not bingeing. These parentally-supplied children also consumed fewer drinks on a typical drinking occasion. Adolescents supplied alcohol from non-parental sources had greater odds of drinking and bingeing,” wrote the research team in the conclusion of the study.
The researchers also emphasized that the study’s findings are preliminary, and therefore no conclusion should be made as to the benefits of feeding your kid booze early on. They added that “Parental supply may have a protective effect, possibly due to the supervised nature of the supply. However, our view is that such a conclusion is premature at this time. These results should not be taken to suggest that parental supply is somehow protective of bingeing in the longer term. In fact, parents may be accelerating children into drinking alcohol, and laying down the potential for later harms.”
Was There Any Point to This Study At All?
The findings of the study really aren’t too great a shock. There seems to be a correlation between withholding something from a child or adolescent—sugar, sex, alcohol or drugs—and an increase in their desire to get their hands on it. The second it’s considered a no-no, many kids (and even adults) want to go after it all the more. (I used to gorge on cakes, cookies and candy when at friends’ houses or during the holidays since my mom never ever had it in the house when I was a kid.)
Sadly, kids with alcoholism in their families or alcoholic parents have demonstrated a higher likelihood to turn into alcoholics if their parents give them liquor when they’re children.
“I have seen cases whereby children started drinking in the presence of their parents and later on [it]became a problem. And they call themselves ‘child of an alcoholic parent’ and they clearly put the blame squarely on their parents, saying that if it was not for that exposure at an early age, they would not have found themselves so easily pulled by alcohol,” said Njeri Muigai, a psychiatrist at a rehabilitation center in Nairobi, Kenya. She added of the study, “The findings actually contradict each other.”
So What’s the Verdict?
I remember clearly the day my dad fed me a whole teaspoon of beer when I was a 10, after I begged him to let me try some. Though I ended up with a drinking problem on my own merits (neither of my parents drink heavily, nor are they alcoholics), I wonder if the memory of tasting a few drops of that rancid stuff helped me stay away from liquor until I went away to college.
It was, quite frankly, disgusting. Since he only gave me a drop and told me to be careful with booze given alcoholism runs in our family, I associated booze with disgustingness and bad consequences for eight years. Sure, I went ape shit with the booze once I turned 18 and moved into the dorms, so who’s to say if it was even worth him sneaking it to me in the first place? I would likely have found my way to the bottom of the bottle with or without the early introduction. It seems to me, as this study indicates, that it was a total toss-up.
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