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Criminalising parents who let their children drink misses the point

Criminalising parents who let their children drink misses the point

Binge drinking among young adults is apparently in decline, falling by one third in the 16 to 24 age group since 2005. Frequent drinking fell by two thirds among youths and increasing numbers of young people say they are teetotal, according to new Office for National Statistics research.

In London, almost one-third of all adults said they did not drink alcohol, but sadly the picture looks a little bleaker in the north of England and, you guessed it, Scotland.

About a third of drinkers in Scotland and the north of England had binged, compared with less than a quarter of those in other parts of Britain.

And although death rates from alcohol in Scotland are lower than they were 10 years ago, we still had the highest drink-related fatalities in the UK in 2013, with Scots men almost twice as likely to succumb as those in England. (Perhaps this is not the right time to lift the alcohol ban at football matches, as Labour is proposing.)

There is no easy way to combat what many see as a cultural problem, but the Scottish Government’s latest ploy, to criminalise parents who let their children drink, misses the point.

The law seems confusing anyway, and will not be clarified if the SNP goes ahead with a blanket ban on serving alcohol to under-18s in public places.

I thought this was already illegal but it hardly matters what I, or any other adult, understands about the law, or how strictly we observe it.

Trying to tackle juvenile alcohol abuse by targeting adults is as nave as saying (as a government spokesman reportedly did over the weekend): “An alcohol-free childhood is the healthiest option as young people’s bodies are more vulnerable than adults.”

Of course an alcohol-free childhood is what we would all wish for our offspring, but once they decide to start drinking they slip easily from our control.

Even parents who have taken a Victorian approach to child rearing can watch helpless as their innocent angel turns, seemingly overnight, into a reckless party animal, who ends her evening’s “fun” in A & E having her stomach pumped. In my middle class bubble, I am aware of two such incidents in the past six months (both involving girls), and many more minor tales of drunken debauchery.

It is an eye opener to be the mother of teenagers because, even if you are blessed with responsible ones, there are individuals in every group, in every school, who overdo it regularly.

To some extent, in my experience, parents collude in this by being too indulgent, acquiescing too readily to teen demands for alcohol.

There is no consensus between parents of what is an acceptable limit, but even if there was, children are devious enough to circumvent the host who has been too stingy.

A mother, who had rationed the prosecco, found several hip flasks littered around her house the morning after her daughter’s riotous bash, along with a sea of empty vodka bottles.

At another event, a 15-year-old girl (nice family, posh school) was turned away for being inebriated on arrival.

If such a child can ply herself with so much alcohol under the gaze of apparently nurturing parents, what hope is there for the kids of dysfunctional homes, with no adult authority at all?

Changing the law will not change such behaviour so we have to look again to our culture.

Areas with higher levels of immigration tend to have lower levels of problem drinking. In London, for example, where a third of people are teetotal more than anywhere else in the country there is greater ethnic diversity, with a higher proportion of young Muslims or Sikhs, whose religions largely forbid alcohol.

Social media is also given some credit for weaning (some) kids away from (some) drink, though this cause and effect doesn’t seem to have infiltrated Scotland yet.

A youth in London said he had never drunk alcohol, even though, at 18, he was now legally entitled.

Putting his parents’ drunken friends to bed did it for him, he said. If the spectacle of middle-aged intoxication not exactly a rare sight here has not deterred our young, maybe nothing will.