From Dear Abby, July 21, Washington Post:
WTF?!? :eek: Who gives an 8-month-old beer? Has anyone heard of this before?
I do remember hearing something a long time ago about how back in the olden days (whenever that was) parents would give babies a cotton ball soaked with liquor to soothe teething pain or help them sleep or something like that. Anyone else heard anything like this?
We tried the bourbon on the pinkie thing with our daughter when she was teething. At the first taste she grabbed my hand and attempted to swallow my arm. We believe she may have an affinity for the stuff–we never tried it again, but it did the job.
What you remember is correct as far as I know. My mother tells me that she used to mix 7up and wine for me when I was teething. I’m a little weird as an adult, but I don’t think it had to do with the alcohol. Certainly I didn’t grow up to be dependent on alcohol. I don’t drink at all any more, and only used to drink things that masked the alcoholic taste. I loathe the taste of alcohol.
As for random sips of beer, I think it’s odd, but it may be the same thing. I’m not sure when babies start teething. It’s probably better not to use alcohol for teething, but I am sure some people still do it.
My parents used to let me sip their drinks when I was a kid. I can only really remember one real episode when I was probably four or so, sitting on the porch with them and everyone drinking beer. Other than a rather unfunny story my mother continues to tell everyone to this day about me downing an entire bottle I stole when I was three, it really wasn’t much at a time. I don’t think it has had any adverse effects on me now.
But I wouldn’t condone the practice a bit, but I think reporting them to child protection services would be a bit harsh if it is only sips.
What bothers me is that the parents keep a cold beer in the fridge of the baby’s very own, not give him occasional sips from their beers. Doesn’t anyone else feel a bit concerned about this? Also, since both parents are “heavy drinkers,” I’d want to know exactly what this amounts to.
It’s definitely enough to be concerned about, and talking to the parents doesn’t seem to do anything. When children are involved, go with your gut.
Well, I see no problem with giving a kid (not a baby) a sip of your beer every once in a while. I know I did that as a kid, and thought it was gross, so no harm done. And I can see how an ounce or less of bourbon might alleviate teething pain. That seems reasonable and I think parents have been doing that for a long time. I guess the question is, are the parents in the letter doing it for teething pain, to get the baby to stop crying, or what? The letter conveniently leaves out the motivation for it. Yeah, I’d have to say reporting it to child protective services seems like way too much.
The first thing I ever tasted was brandy – to take the edge of the circumcision. I think this might be why I really don’t like brandy.
My folks used to let us kids drink on “special occasions.” – and up until very recently kept a picture of me in one of the photo albums, flush-faced and passed out under the dining room table, cradling an empty bottle of Baby Duck. That’d be when I was seven or eight. I finally convinced my mum that most people who saw that picture would be horrified, even if they were too polite to say so, and so the picture has gone down the memory hole.
Alcohol is flavorless.
An ounce of bourbon is nearly a full-sized adult drink. There is a good reason that the dosage on children’s medicines is spelled out so carefully. It is really easy to do damage to a baby’s system. They are much more vulnerable to dehydration and much less able to absorb and process drugs. There are much safer ways to help with teething pain, so I really can’t see that as an excuse.
There are plenty of OTC remedies for teething. Using alcohol is no longer necessary and is dangerous. My dad said you used to be able to pick up peregoric from the pharmacy…which, IIRC, is an opiate.
I think giving a baby any alcohol is abuse. The parents need to be reported.
Well, I think the lefties and the fundies in the US have succeeded in propogating a zero-tolerance myth with regard to alcohol and children. Thus the child protective services comment…
The Italian side of my family (East Boston Sicilians, respectable businesspeople, all of them 
) regularly serves small quantities of wine, 1 or 2 oz, to children with formal meals, starting at about age 6. They also will dip a pacifier or cotton swab in flavored liqueur (like Sambuca or something) to relieve teething pain and quiet a colicky child. My nana used to dip my pacifier in her beer to get me to sleep, even.
None of that was considered abusive, risky, or out of the ordinary in any way. It was just practical wisdom.
And their philosophy about teens and alcohol is that they should be included in family celebrations, with alcohol consumption supervised. The idea is, if the first time you drink your grandmother is sitting at the table, too, then you are going to learn to drink responsibly.
As opposed to the de facto US practice that has evolved, where even a drop is forbidden until their 21st birthday, at which point the person is customarily expected to binge. The first drink most young people get is in a group of other unsupervised young people, and nobody behaves responsibly, or sets any limits on consumption. The whole scenario imprints a person with the “drink to get drunk” mentality rather than the “drink to be social” idea.
Which is more abusive?
It sounds a bit bizarre, at the very least, especially, perhaps, the bit about keeping baby’s very own bottle in the fridge.
I note that no mention is made for whatever the possible excuse or reason for this is.
We’re not talking about dipping a pacifier in a beer, or giving a pre-teen a small glass of wine at Christmas.
This is giving an 8-month old beer. Not rubbing it into the gums, but giving “small sips.” Coupled with the fact that the parents are heavy drinkers is cause for alarm.
Set aside for the moment that in the US, alcohol is not normally given to children. Beer is not nutritious, and should not be given to small children, any more than soda or an excess of candy.
Oooops, yeay your’re right, an ounce is the size of a shot, and that definitely shouldn’t be given to a child!
However, what bughunter describes seems perfectly reasonable to me… I wish we had more information about what people did 100, 200 years ago, because I could swear I have heard that this type of thing used to be common practice.
I would want to know why the parents do this, but the OP case sounds pretty bad. I can quite see that alcohol was once a fine teething medicine, in small doses–though there are better things now. I can understand parents giving school-age children sips of wine at dinner, and that sort of thing (and I’m Mormon, btw, so I wouldn’t do it myself).
But keeping a beer just for the baby? “Routinely” giving him sips? In a family with alcoholism on both sides, which should therefore IMO be avoiding the development of a taste for the stuff in a child? This does not imply a once-a-week sip for a bigger child, this sounds like almost daily alcohol for an infant. That’s over the top, not OK, no way no how.
I don’t know about calling in CPS right away; but if, after talking and providing some reading material and calling in a pediatrician’s advice, CPS might be an option.
IIRC, it was common practice in the 1800’s to give babies a taste of flat beer to put them to sleep and calm their tummies. This may be why these parents are keeping a bottle in the frig for the baby, letting it go flat.
As an aside, when my mother was pregnant with me the doctor (while puffing on a cigarette) told her to prevent morning sickness by “having a beer or two.”(!)
I think the CPS comment comes mainly from the age of the baby and the frequency of the drinking in this example. There’s a big difference between allowing a 6-year-old to start participating in religious and family celebrations and giving beer to an infant. My six-year-old likes calimari and a nicely cooked steak, too, but I wasn’t giving her any when she was 8 months old.
Sure, it was. However, 100+ years ago, opium was sold over the counter and routinely given to infants to make them sleepy and not cry so much. Some of them even starved to death. Urban children could go buy pitchers of beer for their parents down the street, and drink from them at will; so you had the phenomenon of child alcoholics, even to the point of stories of 6-year olds dying of liver failure while begging for a drink.
Heck, just 30 years ago in this country you could buy gripe water, which was essentially whisky for babies. Calmed them down just fine, but it wasn’t good for them. You can still buy the stuff in India, I hear (my first OB was Indian and I took my childbirth class with her other patients as the only white person in the room, so I learned a lot about babycare in India).
We know so much more now about the effects of drugs and alcohol on the human body, and especially about its effects on babies and children, that learning about what was common practice 100 years ago is horrifying. People back then were so ignorant about these issues that anything they did about giving drinks to their children cannot be taken as a particularly good idea.
In a more calm vein, small beer and ale used to be the usual drinks for people, instead of water; the water wasn’t clean enough to drink. And there wasn’t any juice, and milk wasn’t always easy to come by, so even children drank it. But I think it didn’t have a very high alcohol content.
Very interesting, dangermom! I had never heard of gripe water before, so I googled it. Looks like they now have alcohol-free versions, such as Baby’s Bliss Gripe Water to ease colic… According to the site:
Also, there’s Colic Ease:
However, it seems there are other gripe waters in Europe that are being sold online and such that are not FDA-approved, presumably because they have alcohol and other stuff in them, such as Woodward’s Gripe Water (see the FDA product alert here).
I could go pick some up right now at the pharmacy and one of my friends uses it when her son has the hiccups. I’m in Canada.
It appears that the FDA considers it a drug. Several different brands use the lack of alcohol in them as a selling point. I’ve never used it, because I didn’t feel the need to and have a pretty easy going baby, but I’ve heard good things about it.