Hi. Welcome to the blog for my IB English B class at Jur Hronec High School in Bratislava, Slovakia. Below you will find links to other websites and discussion questions. My students are required to comment on one of these postings every month and also respond to each other's comments. Feel free to add your two bits, but be aware that all comments are monitored before being posted.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Tippling with your teens
Should parents teach their kids to drink responsibly by drinking with them? Does a high legal drinking age in the US encourage or discourage teenage drinking? How do your parents handle this problem? How would you (as a parent) handle it? Is alcohol more socially acceptable than it should be, given its negative effects on health and society? What are some of the differences in attitudes between Slovakia and other countries on this issue? The comments on this article are also rather enlightening so you can read and refer to them as well.
Underage drinking is a tricky problem. There’s not really any best way to look at it, to somehow resolve it so that everybody’s satisfied. I certainly agree that alcohol ruins your health and can even cause far greater damages, mental as well as physical. But given that alcohol does this at any time in our life, we can’t argue that it only harms us when we’re children. Of course, I’m not implying that it does not affect us more, I just wish to convey that alcohol is dangerous as it is and since it’s still permissed to drink on our planet I guess people do not think that it’s so destructive.
ReplyDeleteThe main problem that this article was regarding to was parental advice about teen drinking and their way of handling the situation. In my opinion it’s always good that a child learns how to drink responsibly at home, than to get totally wasted on some random party, where there aren’t any limits, but lots and lots of dangers awaiting them. On the other hand I still think that smaller children, especially aged to 15 years, should not be given any alcohol unless it’s directly connected to some religious ritual. I chose 15, because I think that it’s an age when a child stops being a child and becomes a teenager.
At this point the parents should absolutely, as mentioned in the article by Dr. Delany, try to have as many conversations to this topic with their teen as they possibly can. Teens can be persistent in groaning and complaining about not wanting to talk about anything, but they will eventually give in and talk. Once they learn their stance, they should tell them that drinking is dangerous, but many times unavoidable, because let’s face it, how many people you know, who never touched a glass of alcohol? A very few at the best. They should let them know that it’s okay to drink a little, to get a taste, but only when the parents are present. Little by little, the teen will begin to understand that there’s nothing mysterious or exciting to it. As one of these teens myself, I’m really glad my parents decided to treat me fairly and let me decide whether I wanted to occasionally have drink with them, or not. I learned to drink responsibly and now that I’m nearing my 18th birthday and I’m going to be of legal drinking age, I don’t feel the need to drink, nor do I feel any satisfaction from the feeling that I can buy myself a drink. Quite the opposite, I know a lot of people who, when they turned eighteen lost all interest in alcohol, just because the thrill of underage drinking was gone.
=
ReplyDeleteAs it is stated in the article, 45% of 12 to 14 years old drinkers got free alcohol at home. It means that lots of parents do support their children in drinking. Therefore they must have a reason for doing so. I think that parents let their children drink in order to make them more sociable. They just do not want their children to become nerds. In the article they say that parents think allowing teens to drink wine or beer occasionally makes their children less likely to binge with their peers. This is also a good reason but I still think that there are parents who let their children drink just to make their children look more “cool” in the eyes of their peers.
Although I drink at home with my parents and I used to drink too when I was underage, I think that I will not let my children drink. It is very difficult to imagine a situation when I would have to deal with this, but I guess I would have to do that sometimes. Well, Everyone would have to deal with the problem of letting his children drink or not. I personally think that my children would have a lot of time to drink when they would be old. Therefore there is no reason to support them in underage drinking. But it would be very hard since it is natural to drink alcohol nowadays, even when you are underage. As it is illustrated in the picture in the article, 72% of high school students have had at least one drink.
Tomas Langer 3.IB
It’s a coincidence that I have discussed this topic with my uncle and grandmother just 3 weeks ago at our holiday. In our family we always drink when we have a meal together, no matter whether it is a lunch or a dinner. However my parents started giving me full glasses of alcohol just when I was sixteen. What I did is that I gave my 15 years old brother a glass of bear, because my parents wouldn’t do so. My grandma complained that I shouldn’t have done it using the same arguments mentioned in this article (more likely to get addicted, damaged brain cells), furthermore she said that my grandfather has ruined his successful career because of alcohol. In the meantime my uncle was replenishing my empty glass of bear.
ReplyDeleteI based my argument on my experience, I have already attended many parties. The trend that you see there is that the ones who aren’t given alcohol at home, are the ones who get wasted outmost, this is a fact. It implies even more to the ones who are beginner drinkers (age 15/16). These are the people end up having unplanned pregnancies or being hospitalized with alcohol intoxication. So before my brother would start to drink heavily with his friends at all sorts of events, he should be given some drinks at home so alcohol wouldn’t be, as Sashka said something mysterious to him, and therefore he wouldn’t get wasted too much. My uncle had a final remark that his dad has actually ruined his career because his parents didn’t give him alcohol at home. All in all I think that all young teens will eventually drink alcohol, this was even proved by the alcohol and drug use survey. And thus we should prepare our children by drinking in small amounts at home.
In addition, if oneself would just start to drink alcohol when he turns 18, how would he end up? Wouldn’t it be better for his organism to start drinking little by little with his parents? Wouldn’t he feel detached from his friends who would go drinking every Friday since their sixteen’s without him? Little by little drinking with parents give an answer to all of these questions. Austria is a good example of little by little drinking , it is allowed to drink beer and wine there from 16, and still the number of addicted is decreasing each year.
I agree with Sashka that alcohol harms us at any age, although teens are more likely to become addicted. But the factor that is really to decide about our addiction is not the age but our predispositions to it. So once you know that you have an alcohol addicted family member, you should be careful with drinking.
This is a very pleasant article in the sense that it’s dealing with a not very much debated issue. I haven’t seen any official text which would discuss the advantages or disadvantages of teens drinking with their parents.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, I wouldn’t be much hopeful as a parent to think that if I drink with my kids, they won’t be so tempted by alcohol afterwards with their peers. The only benefit they get from it is the knowledge of a good brand of beer or wine (which is also useful, but probably not as the majority of parents intend). At best, it could influence the ones who happen to fall for the taste of beer to stick mainly to that. However, I suspect that here the list of potential benefits ends.
I cannot see any proof why tippling with teens would be useful apart from the results of a survey of 6,245 U.S. teens, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2004, which was mentioned in the article. It says that the children of parents who taught them to drink were only one-third as likely to binge and half as likely to be regular drinkers as the others who didn’t start by drinking with their parents. The other survey (2003 European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Drugs) however shows a different result. The amount of kids, who use to binge, is higher in France and Italy, where it’s a part of their culture to drink wine regularly within the meals.
Since not even surveys make the matter clear, I would say it is up to parents to choose whether to introduce their kids to the world of drinking or not. They must take into account in beforehand that kids will be tempted to binge even in spite of the fact that they have already tried it with their parents. Kids could also start to regard drinking as something quite normal if they drank with their parents normally and could make a habit out of it, which would, of course, be an undesired effect.
Nevertheless, I would say that parents shouldn’t over-dramatize the situation anyway. Teenage years are a period in person’s life that everyone has to experience and come over it himself/herself and alcohol and experimenting with various things are unmistakably a part of it.
This comment is from Ondrej:
ReplyDeleteI do not think that drinking at home with parents causes the kids to drink more outside. However, there have to be limits on how much (at my home it’s just a sip if my parents are drinking) and also it depends on the attitude of the parents and what kind of message they give their child. If the kid sees its parents getting drunk every other night I would say that he is more likely to start binge drinking regardless of the fact that his parents may or may not give him a drink too. Communication between the child and the parent is a very important part of every aspect of a child’s evolution including the part about alcohol. As the article states, if the parents don’t teach the child it will learn on its own most likely in a way that the parents wouldn’t like. Therefore I think it is important for parents to teach kids to drink responsibly by talking with them, and maybe giving them an occasional glass of wine or a sip of whisky.