Not too long ago I posted a rant about how I believe putting alcohol on a pedestal encourages its abuse. I also said parents should be allowed to drink with their kids and model responsible drinking habits. Last month TIME published an article on this topic. Here's a couple quotes:
"A few years ago, a team of North Carolina researchers, led by public-health professor Kristie Long Foley, examined whether adults' approval or disapproval mattered when adolescents were deciding whether and how much to drink. Foley's team analyzed surveys of more than 6,000 people ages 16 to 20 in 242 U.S. communities. One predictable finding: kids whose parents gave them alcohol for parties were more likely to binge-drink. That discovery underscored years of research showing that the earlier people start to drink, the more likely they are to become alcoholics.
But another result was surprising: if kids actually drank with their parents, they were about half as likely to say they had drunk alcohol in the past month and about one-third as likely to say they had had five or more drinks in a row in the previous two weeks. As Foley and her colleagues wrote in a 2004 Journal of Adolescent Health paper, "Drinking with parents appears to have a protective effect on general drinking trends."'
"Kids from the Southern European countries of the Romance languages--France, Romania, Italy, Spain and Portugal--get drunk at about the same rate as American teens (or slightly less often) even though a typical kid in these countries can buy wine or beer in any shop from early adolescence. The Southern European model of moderate, supervised drinking within families seems to be the most promising approach, on the basis of the North Carolina study. Italy and Spain report very low rates of alcohol dependence or abuse (less than 1% and 2.8%, respectively) compared with the U.S., where the rate is 7.8%, slightly lower than France's 8.7%. (All the figures are from the World Health Organization.)"
2 comments:
Honestly, I doubt that any country has less than 1% dependence on alcohol. How does the WHO gather those statistics? Are they the same criteria in every country? Also, those stats don't seem very conclusive... France has open drinking policies yet a higher rate of dependence than us. So how does that support your thesis?
their policies are the opposite from ours, yet have virtually the same results. true, that doesn't show that a lax view of alcohol consumption always curbs dependance, but it shows that harsher drinking laws don't really either. but that's just france, other countries (of course, you dispute those statistics) show a much lower rate. there could be other reasons why france has a higher rate.
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