I was talking with a friend yesterday, and she was upset that her cousin’s latest husband allows his 18-year-old daughter to drink. She says that children shouldn’t drink they are 21, because it’s harmful to their health. Coincidentally, Father Goose played on TCM yesterday and the Leslie Carone character (“Miss Freneau”) said “I’m French. I started drinking wine with water when I was six!”
In my opinion, I don’t see anything wrong with allowing children to drink “wine with water” during the evening meal under the supervision of their parents. I think it would help to develop a healthier attitude toward alcohol. That is, when they are teenagers they might not see “the big deal” about drinking and choose not to sneak around getting drunk. I also think there are health benefits, as have been documented in recent years among adults. I find that a glass of red wine with a meal “helps with the digestion”, personally. And a little alcohol can help the kids go to sleep while the parents… “attend to other activities”.
Now, I’m not talking about getting a kid drunk. I’m talking about one glass of wine mixed with 50% water with dinner. I am not talking about letting a kid drink alcohol whenever he wants. Just with dinner, just one, diluted, and under parental supervision.
What do you think?
[sub]FWIW, I was not allowed alcohol when I was a kid. I would occasionally get a glass of wine with dinner on special occasions such as Thanksgiving or Christmas starting at 16. I like wine, beer, liquers and spirits; but I rarely drink any alcohol at all. It’s not something I think about, much less “crave”. It actually takes a conscious effort. I did get drunk on beer from time to time when I was a Young Adult – about 19 years old until about 23 – on the occasional weekend.[/sub]
A friend of mine at University told me he drank wine with his dinner since he was very young (I’ll guess about 10). It was probably one glass per meal. He implied that it was quite normal in certain areas of society for kids to drink wine with meals.
At 25 I can still get quite light-headed after two glasses of red with food. I’d imagine the effect on children would be much higher.
P.S. There was a show on SKY (UK) called “Britain’s Toughest Pubs”. In one scene a toddler (about 3) appeard to be finishing a pint.
I don’t see a problem with it, but my family is divided on this.
My Dad’s side is easygoing, they have drinks on holidays and such when everyone gets together. I’ve been drinking wine with supper since I hit my teens, and had I asked I would’ve been given a small glass of rum and coke after supper. (It never occured to me that I could, until my brother, who is younger than me, asked about it) We aren’t forced to drink it, but if we want we could have a small amount.
On my Mom’s side they were adamant that I, as I was underage, was not allowed to have wine with supper (or any alcohol at all). I found this somewhat irritating at 17, mere months away from being legal (it’s 18 here) and being refused even a sip with supper when I’ve been drinking wine for years. What I find even more amusing is that they are Catholic, and I was raised Catholic… I was sipping wine at mass from the time I was 8.
When my son gets older I will allow him some watered wine with supper, if he wants. But that’s not for some time yet.
Tell her to come to Alberta, where 18 is the legal age. I well remember seeing a group of 18-year-olds from California drinking beer and gambling in the casino during this year’s Calgary Stampede. There were a few shouts of “Woo-hoo, we can legally drink and gamble here!,” but generally, they were quite well-behaved–they each had a beer and played a few slot machines, then left.
Anyway, maybe it’s because I’m in Canada where the age is either 18 or 19, depending on the province, but I see nothing wrong with allowing a teen to have a glass of wine or beer under parental supervision. My parents allowed me that when I was about 16 or so, and it certainly demystified alcohol for me. Yes, I did my share of underage drinking in the park after dark with my buddies, but never to excess. Of course, once I turned 18, I was legal anyway, so any kind of “secret” drinking outside of my parents’ view or using a fake ID to get into a bar wasn’t an issue.
She’s talking garbage, using a spurious suggestion that there’s a difference between the health effects on 18 and 21 years olds to defend an opinion she’s developed for other reasons.
I have a 16YO daughter and my own take on this is to allow her an occasional drink at home. I grew up in West Ky. where people seem to be either binge-drinkers or complete abstainers and didn’t think either aproach was healthy.
So, if my daughter wants to have a glass of homemade red wine she is perfectly welcome to do so. AT HOME She did want to see what more alcohol would do once so I made strawberry daquiris. She drank a couple, giggled a bit and went to sleep. Her comment the next day was “what’s the big deal?”
My own feeling is that children will experiment with alcohol. I did it when I was a kid and almost everyone else I know did so as well. Seeing as this is going to happen, having her at home keeps her in a safe environment and keeps her from overdoing the thing.
ISTR asking a few months ago about the legality of serving alcohol to one’s own children. IIRC (and I’m not sure I do) it’s perfectly legal. Of course, allowing a child to get drunk would be child abuse.
She’s convinced that a child’s future health can be damaged by alcohol, smoking, drugs, &c. more readily than can an adult’s. I’m convinced that alcohol (though not drugs or smoking, of course) can have a beneficial effect on a child’s future health as long as the serving is limited. I think her take on it is that an adult can make his or her own decisions, and that she considers 21 to be the age of adultery… erm, adulthood.
Well, I come from a German/Irish/Italian background and we were allowed wine mixed with 7-up when we were kids at big family dinners. We also occasionally got a small glass of beer. My oldest brother did end up an alcoholic but I don’t think it was related to that. Another brother had a DUI in his early 20’s but he had had a head injury just before that so his disorientation probably had more to do with that. I have some sort of neuromuscular disease but I doubt it’s related to that either. Um … anyway, I really don’t think it had any effect on us.
I’m pretty sure it’s legal as long as it’s your own child and they aren’t getting drunk. In the example I gave of my family, my Mom had no problem giving me wine (she let me drink from her glass) but the rest of her family refused because of my age.
Whether or not a child’s health is adversely affected by a glass of wine, it’s irrelevant to this case, because an 18-year-old is physically not a child. And if she wants to not allow freedom to make these decisions until 21, that doesn’t affect the situation at the dinner table, where it’s an elder making the decision anyway.
I still think she’s just got an immediate “alcohol…no…” response, which she’s now trying to rationalise away.
I don’t drink. At all. Ever. I come from a family where there’s rampant alcoholism on my grandfather’s side – and a minimum, working class people who are seriously into drinking (the rest don’t have jobs). I watched from a young age my grandfather hide liquor around the house and fight with his wife – it hurt their marriage, slowly destroyed his health and his creativity as an artist, his ability to paint and abetted his deterioration into senility before his death.
I sipped beer from his can watching football games on his lap, while fishing, sometimes just sitting sround the back porch. All before the age of seven, and before I realized all his sneaking around was not normal behavior. That is the extent of my drinking.
If I give alcohol to my kids at all, it’ll be in the best tradition of making them into teetotallers – by making them line up during the holidays and obnoxiously giving them a spoonful of scotch or something. I’d make the experience so dreadful they’d never THINK about socially drinking
Well, the friend seems a bit too keen to assume that an artbitrary legal cut-off point says all there is to say about maturity, health effects and I don’t know what else. It has been pointed out that the legal age in Canada is either 18 or 19, I’m here to mention that the age for drinking alcohol in the U.K. is 18 - that’s in pubs/bars - I think the law allows for parents permitting a litle alcohol to certain ages udner 18, but I cannot be certain. Likewise, I’m sure other European countries have more liberal laws than we do in Britain. The “age 21” law somehow seem to be just a handy peg for the O.P.'s friend to hang her own opinions on.
Actualy 21 does seem a little on the “old” side to me, but it has been so long since I was either 18 or 21 that I cannot pretend to have given it any serious thought lately.
I remember when the drinking age was 18. The argument for raising it wasn’t to keep all the frail little 18 year olds from poisoning their childlike bodies with demon rum. It was, “Get alcohol out of the high schools”: that 18-year-old seniors were buying for sophomores and juniors, and we needed to stop them to keep it away from the 15 and 16 year olds. No one mentions that any more.
I say pour a round for everybody! (Hic :)) The cultures with the lowest alcoholism rates are the ones that say drunkenness is gross, but drinking is just another part of life.
Living in France for a year opened my eyes to the whole issue. The purchasing age there is 16, drivers license at 18 (if you’re lucky enought to pass your driving test the first time). Children are brought up with wine available at mealtimes as a normal part of life. I saw teenagers respecting alcohol more there than we allow them to in America. We have this really wierd attitude about alcohol (that also seems to include human sexuality): either nothing at all, or all-out you’re-not-having-fun-until-you’re-sick drinking. I don’t see a lot of public effort put into teaching respect for alcohol at a young age, even though it appears that a significant number of American children are brought up this way in private at home. I find it interesting that in Kentucky at least, most of the counties are dry, including many that produce bourbon. Whenever there’s a wet/dry vote, you’d think the Apocalypse was coming; there’s never any serious public discussion on what alcohol is and isn’t. I truly believe that children, exposed to alcohol at home in appropriate quantities at appropriate times will be more responsible than those who sneak around consuming it as contraband.
If you socialize the kids to accept drinking with food as part of the meal, and that drunkedness is rude, to say the least, the kids will be able to handle themselves for the rest of their lives around alcohol and those who abuse it. Take away the mystique, and wine is just another food item.
I was allowed small glasses of wine, beer, Scotch, anything I wanted even as a toddler. These were very small amounts. I learned very early to distinguish the good stuff from the cheap stuff, and came to no harm. Later on, in high school, I was mystified with what a “big deal” drinking was among other kids. To me wine and beer were just food items we had with dinner, and Scotch or a cordial was just an appetizer. It also amused me that they would guzzle until they got sick, instead of having the sense to stop when they were full. There is no history of alcoholism in the family, we just don’t have the genetic make up for it I suppose.
When I was a small baby, my Caribbean grandmother encouraged my mother to put a few drops of rum into my baby bottle to make me sleep. Rum was similarly used to numb my teething pains. Aged three, I once begged sips of champagne off guests at a wedding until I was paralytic.
My parents gave me wine with Sunday lunch from about the age of 11. At the age of 12 I bought my first pint in a pub (accidentally - I was looking for a can of non-alcoholic shandy but the slightly senile old lady who ran the pub had run out, so gave me a pint of beer and a bottle of lemonade [that’s ~7-Up for the Yanks]). I got plastered. Also used to get given the odd glass of sherry or beer on special occasions.
As a teenager I used to get drunk with my friends for the hell of it, usually on vermouth because it was cheap, as part of my program of experimentation with narcotics, but very rarely to the point of vomiting.
As an adult, meh. I’m pretty much normal for someone from the UK or Ireland: I get drunk at least once every weekend, but I don’t drink every day, and I don’t find my relationship with alcohol to be problematic.
I’m 20 and have never had a drink. I will not drink until I’m 21. There are no health issues involved, there are no religious issues involved. I’m not the only one.
It’s against the law, and the benefits (for me, at least) do not outweigh the risks.
The attitude that “Oh, well, they’re going to do it anyway,” is, in my opinion, something which causes much of the problem.
And denying this likelihood on the strength of personal anecdote is naïve. That’s like refusing to give kids sex education because abstinence is the only way forward.
