Drinking Age: Would You Give Your 12-Year-Old A Beer?

babble.com - Posted by Sierra on Feb 21st, 2011 at 4:00 pm

Many parents provide beverage to their kids

Drinking booze is a strictly grown-up activity, right?

Wrong. Most of us hit our possess inclined – or at small blurry – memories of crapulence as teens. That teenage crapulence is play junior these days. Forget most prom night. A newborn think shows that roughly 6% of kids ages 12 to 14 ingest alcohol. And a shocking sort of them are getting it from their parents.

While in 15% of cases, the kids are taking beverage from their parents without permission, added 15% are getting it direct from their parent or guardian. A similar sort get grown-up drinks from added relative.

Really, people. They’re called “adult beverages” for a reason. They’re for adults.

Why would parents not only encourage their kids to drink, but actually provide them the alcohol?

According to Business Week, it’s a ultimate misconception: parents conceive that by giving kids booze at home, they’re way soured worse problems. Business Week quotes one of the think authors saying:

Anecdotally, parents say, ‘Well, at small they are crapulence at bag and not on the street, or at small they are not respiration marijuana’ — all kind of confused things.

I’m familiar with this attitude. Before I had kids, I modify mutual it. I intellection the American crapulence laws were absurd, and that teens should be taught to ingest responsibly at bag by having the irregular render of intoxicant with dinner. That seemed same the civilized, dweller approach. One that would impact teens with attitude and attain crapulence a connatural part of life, not proscribed fruit.

Since I became a parent, though, I’ve feature sufficiency most teens and beverage to wager the problem with that theory: it’s wrong. Teenagers who ingest don’t acquire up to be adults who undergo how to appendage their liquor. Rather, teen teens who ingest are 5 times more probable to hit problems with beverage than those who don’t contact the stuff before geezerhood 15.

There’s a aggregation of grouping on the other lateral of this argument though: according to this study, at small 200,000 kids were presented beverage by an grown qualifying last period alone.

Would you let your female drink? Would you provide a teenager a beer, or a cocktail? What do you conceive is the prizewinning move to teens and drinking?

Photo: quinn.anya

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