Will a Sip of Alcohol Hurt Your Kid? Studies Say Yes
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Will a Sip of Alcohol Hurt Your Kid? Studies Say Yes

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Will a Sip of Alcohol Hurt Your Kid? Studies Say YesI can imagine that when you become a parent, there are plenty of little moments where you are required to make a quick decision about something you may have never considered before—like whether or not to give your six-year old son a sip of what Daddy is drinking when he asks. Of course, the collective conscious, politically correct, knee-jerk answer to this would be no—but how an individual parent feels about exposing their children to alcohol at a young age is not that cut and dry.

To Sip or Not to Sip

The Globe and Mail recently reported that some parents feel giving their children small amounts of alcohol helps them develop a healthy relationship with it. Their argument is that telling a kid they can’t do something makes them want to do it more. While this can certainly be true, it doesn’t mean that your kid is going to experience what a woman quoted in their story who “unlike her peers…never had the urge to get drunk in high school or college” did.

The idea that parents should raise their children by way of reverse psychology might make sense (and even work) but it also seems manipulative, which can confuse kids and make them resentful. So the question is whether or not it’s better for parents to set boundaries in their kids’ best interest even though they may not obey them or do whatever it takes to yet the results they want.

Parents Should Play Hard to Get

Oddly, I can equate it to dating (stay with me here). Men may like women who are promiscuous and willing to engage in intercourse right away but that doesn’t mean they want them as girlfriends (it also doesn’t mean they don’t). Some men—especially those suffering from the ever-attractive Madonna-Whore complex—enjoy the company of a sexually liberated woman for a night or two (or even several years of a casual relationship) but ultimately want to seriously date or marry the kind of girl who will make them work for it—set boundaries with them and give them the illusion that they don’t just have sex with anyone (emphasis on illusion).

Children are like men (oh let me count the ways) in that they may not be inclined to binge drink as teenagers if they were allowed to drink in the home at a young age (the same way a man might date you even if you give up the goods quickly) but a child who is given alcohol at home could also end up developing a palette for it at a formative time in their life and experience an adverse affect (the same way a man might lose respect for you if you have sex too quickly). So when it comes to the philosophy of allowing your kids sips of beer in hopes of demystifying drinking, it might be safer to just lead by example, drink responsibly and play the boring bad guy parent when it comes to allowing them to consume alcohol before they are legally allowed to.

What Role Do Parents Play?

I would assume that a parent’s decision to allow or forbid underage drinking—even if that is just a sip—in the home or on their watch depends heavily on how they were raised and what their relationship is with alcohol now. For instance, I would never allow my kids (if I had any) to take a sip of a beer in my presence because not only am I a recovering alcoholic and would hate to be responsible for giving anyone their first drink but also because it’s not how I was raised. I didn’t grow up in a drinking home. There might have been wine or beer floating around on holidays but I certainly don’t recall drinking as being part of my family’s culture. This also goes to show that little to no exposure to alcohol as a child does not prevent them from abusing it later in life.

And yet in the great state of Rhode Island—just 45 south of my hometown of Newton, Massachusetts—a study was conducted which showed that children who were given sips of alcohol by their parents before the age of 11 were four times more likely to abuse alcohol in high school than kids who were not—numbers that still held strong even after the parents’ drinking habits and family history of alcoholism were accounted for. But does this have more to do with alcohol hitting a youngster’s bloodstream or just the fact that influence on children is more about leading by example than it is about parental rules and discipline?

But What About Before We Knew Better?

Anyone born in the 1960s and 70s is familiar with the sentence, “My mother drank and smoked cigarettes when she was pregnant with me and I turned out fine,” but is that true? There’s no control group that can reveal how we would have turned out otherwise. I have often heard people in the rooms of 12-step meetings talk about how their mother put whiskey in their milk to help them sleep or gave them a hot toddy when they were sick—their point surely being that this early exposure to alcohol was a contributing factor to their alcoholism.

I am probably not the best person to ask about this sort of thing. When I was three years old, my mother found me passed out drunk underneath the grand piano. It’s not like I had broken into my parents’ liquor cabinet and taught myself how to make a dirty martini; it was my brother’s bris and I had innocently polished off everyone’s half empty flutes of champagne. This didn’t worry or upset her; she thought it was funny—until I was 27 and realized I was an alcoholic. All of a sudden, stories like that became puzzle pieces I began to put together to see just how far back my love of binge drinking went. And while I don’t believe the introduction of champagne to my infantile palette is what made me an alcoholic, there’s no way to tell for sure. And damn it, there’s not even anyone to blame.

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About Author

Danielle Stewart is a Los Angeles-based writer and recovering comedian. She has written for Showtime, E!, and MTV, as well as print publications such as Us Weekly and Life & Style Magazine. She returned to school and is currently working her way towards a master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy. She loves coffee, Law & Order SVU, and her emotional support dog, Benson.