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Covering the case of a woman who has been sentenced to 27 months in prison for providing alcohol to her 16-year-old son and his friends at a party (she confiscated car keys to prevent drunk driving, but lied to other parents about the fact that she was going to serve drinks), Newsweek presents what seems to be an unassailable case against parents teaching kids to drink responsibly. 

Quoting an expert from Stanford, the article says, “The earlier a kid starts drinking, the more likely they are to have problems with alcohol in their life." But the data that seems to support this position is more equivocal than that quote makes it sound. 

It is true that people who report that they started drinking before age 14 are far more likely to become alcoholics than those who don’t start until after 20. But this is correlational data. Those who report drinking regularly before their peers tend to have alcoholic parents, high rates of trauma and other factors that increase their risks for alcoholism.

The article doesn’t cite one of the few studies looking directly at the effect of parents drinking with their kids. Published in 2004, it found that parents who drank at home with their kids had teens who were half as likely to binge drink as those who did not. 

Supporting Newsweek, however, the study did find that those who threw drinking parties for their teens had adolescents with double the rate of binging. But that could be an artifact of the fact that people who are willing to risk jail to throw teen drinking parties may have other kinds of problems, as the case of the woman who lied to her fellow parents suggests.

The magazine then attempts to debunk claims that countries like Italy and France, which encourage early drinking with meals, have lower rates of alcohol problems. It quotes chief executive officer of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, who claims “The highest rate of cirrhosis of the liver is in France.”

This actually isn’t true:  according to a study published in the Lancet in 2006, Austria, Denmark, Germany and Scotland all have higher rates and differing alcohol policies.

In terms of intoxication among teens, France has a slightly lower percent of teens who report it in the past month:  15% as opposed to America’s 18%. Heavy teen drinking is somewhat higher in France according to that same 2003 report; however, this appears to be a relatively recent development, reflecting a shift away from France’s traditional view of alcohol as a food and towards the Northern European view of it as drug.

In other words, there’s a whole other side to the story that Newsweek simply didn’t cover. Given that 80% of teens will drink before they reach the legal age, it is not unreasonable for parents to consider ways to reduce the risks their kids face as a result, and the magazine does a disservice to them by blindly supporting current policy without fully investigating the research.

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