Underage drinking: Down the hatch, Dad

When I was 10 years old, my parents tried the Continental approach to teaching me and my siblings about alcohol. I remember it clearly... then not so clearly. My parents gave me, my brother and my sister a glass of wine with our Sunday lunch. It tasted pretty disgusting. Corked, I'm sure. After the meal, we headed for the garden.

"Look at me, I'm drunk," I said, staggering across the lawn. We bumped into each other, faux-slurring, like we'd seen adults do when they'd had too much to drink. We didn't feel tipsy enough, though, so we spun around and around until we fell down. My parents clocked this spectacle and ended the experiment. Evidently it wasn't the right time to introduce alcohol at meal times. I couldn't look at white wine for a long time after that without feeling ill. By my early teens, the list of drinks that made me sick just to look at included: Old Brown Sherry, Clubman Mint Punch, Vin Coco, Coco Rico and Castello Ginger Fizz (don't ask), But, like a trooper, I persevered, getting drunk on every cheap, sweet alcoholic drink pocket money could buy.

Despite the Sunday afternoon fiasco, my parents remained liberal about underage drinking, even though my mother was – and still is – almost teetotal. For example, I recall going to the pub with my parents before a school prize-giving. I must have reeked of beer when I accepted the Shield for Progress. Given the heavy boozing in my adolescent years – and given the evidence from scientific research – I should now be an alcoholic with mental health problems, low educational attainment and a criminal record. But I'm not. I still drink, only much more sensibly now. Do I set a good example for my children? I think so. Probably. I don't know. Is two bottles of wine a week a bad example?

I think two bottles of wine is about 20 units, one unit below the recommended number of units for men per week. Like my parents, I take a laid-back approach to alcohol with my daughter, who is now 20 and my son, who is 16 years old. Luckily for me, they're much more sensible than I was. Not once have I had to clean up their alcohol-induced vomit. In fact, I've never seen them drunk – a vast improvement on me. If they're 16 or older, I let my children have a beer at home. (It's legal to do that at home, as long as they're five years old or above.) A couple of weeks ago, my son asked me if he could have the one remaining beer in the fridge. I said yes. The beer is still there.

When my son visits his friends, their parents sometimes offer him a beer, as I occasionally do when their children visit. I wouldn't dream of offering a beer to one of my son's friends if I didn't know their parents or their attitude towards underage drinking.

A survey conducted by MBF Healthwatch in Australia found that most adults believe 15- to 17-year-olds should be allowed to consume alcohol under parental supervision at home. And the higher the parent's income, the more likely they are to allow drinking at home.

So, is this a more enlightened approach – introducing small amounts of alcohol at a younger age? The Continental way seems to work for my children, even if not for me.

I decided to ask someone from the Continent how it should be done. How do parents introduce drinking at home and at what age? "I didn't drink alcohol till I was 19," says Alfonso Iglesias, a restaurant owner in Clapham, London. Alfonso grew up in Gijon, a city in the north of Spain. "In Spain, parents are quite strict about their children drinking. At least they were when I was growing up. It's very rare to see a child of 15 or 16 having a glass of wine or a glass of beer. Parents allow children to be part of the socialising, but they are very strict when it comes to drinking."

This wasn't the answer I was expecting. Still, it was nice to have a stereotype destroyed. "People may think that the Continental model – if you want to call it that – would suggest that children from Italy, Portugal and Greece have had at least one glass of beer, wine or spirits earlier than children in the UK, but actually, it's not the case," says Professor Mark Bellis, the director of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University.

Quoting the biggest survey of youth drinking in Europe, Espad (European School Survey Project on Alcohol and other Drugs), Professor Bellis tells me that the UK has a higher proportion of children who have tried one glass of beer by age 13 than Italy, Portugal and Greece. For wine, the UK is higher than Italy and Portugal and only 1 per cent lower than Greece. And for spirits, the UK is higher than all of them.

"So, children in the UK, at age 13, are more likely than their European counterparts to have at least one glass of an alcoholic drink," says Professor Bellis.

"Then, if you look at the proportion of 13-year-olds who have been drunk, Greece – in the same study– is 6 per cent, Portugal 7 per cent, Italy 7 per cent and the UK 24 per cent. So the idea that introducing children to alcohol is firstly Mediterranean and, secondly, associated with a responsible attitude towards drinking is actually quite opposite of what the data supports."

There is new research coming out of the US – both animal studies and MRI studies of teenagers – which show the adverse effects of alcohol on the developing brain. But it's early days and no one really knows if the effects are long term or reversible. But what do we know about the long-term impacts of heavy drinking in adolescence?

Jim McCambridge of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reviewed the evidence and published his findings in PLoS Medicine earlier this year. He looked at 54 studies on the long-term consequences of heavy drinking in 15- to 19-year-olds. "The strongest evidence we found was that heavier drinking in teenage years means you're likely to be drinking heavier later in life and it's more likely that you'll have problems with alcohol, including dependence," he says. "But looking at other consequences of alcohol – criminal offences, educational attainment, mental health – the literature wasn't in great shape. There is only a very small quantity of high quality studies on which you can depend."

But, Professor Bellis says, put aside the long-term impact of teen drinking and the still-being-debated impact on neurological development for now.

"A lot of people focus on those sorts of issues," he says, "but it's much easier to say: if you look at the alcohol consumption of 15- and 16-year-olds, how many of them get involved in violence or make sexual decisions they wouldn't have, or don't manage to get to school or forget things as a result of their alcohol consumption? In the UK, some studies we've done of 10,000 young people by the ages of 15 and 16, three out of every 10 children that drink have been involved in alcohol-related violence and one in eight had alcohol-related sex that they later regretted."

I can warn my children about these dangers, but are they likely to listen? Haven't psychologists been telling us for years that peers have a much bigger influence on teenagers than parents? It turns out it's true that parents have little influence when it comes to their teenage children trying alcohol, but they do have significant influence when it comes to heavy drinking.

A study conducted Brigham Young University in the US found that parenting style strongly and directly affects teens when it comes to heavy drinking – defined as five or more drinks in a row. The researchers surveyed nearly 5,000 people between the ages of 12 and 19 about their drinking habits and their relationship with their parents. Much to my chagrin, the study also found that "indulgent parents" – ah, the sting of that term! – the ones low on accountability and high on warmth, nearly tripled the risk of their child participating in heavy drinking.

Apparently, the right style is to be high on warmth, high on accountability. This group had teenage offspring that were least prone to heavy drinking. Even strict parents did better than indulgent parents. Strict parents – high on accountability, low on warmth – more than doubled their teen's risk of heavy drinking.

OK, I'm going to get rid of the beer lurking at the bottom of the fridge. Then I'm going to give my son a hug.

For more advice, visit www.drinkaware.co.uk/parents

Tips for parents

* The average age children have their first unsupervised drink is 13.8 so it's important to talk to children before they start drinking — it's never too early.

* Keep the conversation going. Make sure your children know they can talk to you about alcohol at any time.

* Soap-opera storylines, news stories or anecdotal stories from school can be a good opportunity to introduce the topic of alcohol.

* Even if your child has already started drinking, it's never too late to start talking to them about the risks associated with alcohol.

* If your child does get drunk, try not to overreact. Talk to them about it the next morning and listen to what they say.