Should You Drink with Your Kids?

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Most alcohol laws were enacted before we began trying to construct a zero-tolerance, total-abstinence culture for our teenagers--a phenomenon of the post-Columbine, post--Bill Clinton years. Two decades ago, prevention efforts aimed at kids focused on school programs that taught the dangers of excessive drinking. The trouble was, the programs didn't work very well. Teen drinking rose during the 1980s, the heyday for well-meaning, not especially effective programs like Drug Abuse Resistance Education. "The research kept coming over and over again that you can do this education stuff, but then you put these kids back in this culture, and it really doesn't make much difference," says DiCiccio, who has a master's in social work.

So in the '90s, DiCiccio and other alcohol officials around the country began to shift their focus from education to what is known as environmental prevention--banning alcohol in public places, for instance, or restricting alcohol licenses near schools. Prevention officials began working less with teachers and more with cops. In a way, the new strategy worked: fewer kids drink now because it's harder for them to obtain alcohol. But as psychologist Stanton Peele writes in his 2007 book Addiction-Proof Your Child (one of his 10 books on addiction), "When alcohol is presented as impossibly dangerous, it becomes alluring as a 'forbidden fruit' ... The choice between abstinence and excess is not a good one to force on children."

By the early part of the current decade, alcohol officials had noticed the numbers on binge-drinking, and they embarked on a new kind of prohibitionist strategy to discourage it: the "social host" law, the most sweeping change in American alcohol-enforcement since Prohibition. Social-host laws make residents over 21 responsible for any underage drinking that occurs at their home. The laws vary, but those who break them can be fined, forced to pay for police costs that result from underage drinking or even jailed. Twenty-four states and more than 100 local jurisdictions have passed such laws, the majority of them in the past five years. Many of the laws make no allowance even for parents to drink with their own kids; of the 55 social-host laws passed by California jurisdictions, for instance, only 25 make exceptions for parents.

That matters because there's evidence that drinking with your kids--not buying them alcohol for a party but actually drinking with them at home--is a good way to teach responsible drinking behavior.

A few years ago, a team of North Carolina researchers, led by public-health professor Kristie Long Foley, examined whether adults' approval or disapproval mattered when adolescents were deciding whether and how much to drink. Foley's team analyzed surveys of more than 6,000 people ages 16 to 20 in 242 U.S. communities. One predictable finding: kids whose parents gave them alcohol for parties were more likely to binge-drink. That discovery underscored years of research showing that the earlier people start to drink, the more likely they are to become alcoholics.

But another result was surprising: if kids actually drank with their parents, they were about half as likely to say they had drunk alcohol in the past month and about one-third as likely to say they had had five or more drinks in a row in the previous two weeks. As Foley and her colleagues wrote in a 2004 Journal of Adolescent Health paper, "Drinking with parents appears to have a protective effect on general drinking trends."

How this approach would work in any individual case depends, obviously, on the kid and the parent. Peele, the addiction expert, raised his own daughter (who is 20 and will be a junior at New York University) to drink a "few sips" of alcohol at family meals until she was about 16, when she could have a full glass of whatever the adults were drinking. "You give them sips as smaller kids, and you don't make a big deal about it," says Peele, 62. "Around 16, give them a glass of wine. A second glass probably doesn't make sense, but making hard-and-fast rules creates the sense that alcohol is some magical potion."

I was still curious to see how drinking with your kid might work in practice. Peele referred me to Tom Horvath, a past president of the American Psychological Association's division on addictions and the father of a 17-year-old, Greg. Through his work treating at least 2,000 people with substance-abuse problems, Horvath has come to believe that the best way to teach your kids about alcohol is to demystify it. Horvath, 54, was never forbidden alcohol; he recalls that his grandmother gave him his first sip of wine at age 4 or 5. He spat it out, but he absorbed the lesson that alcohol was part of family life. Growing up, he occasionally drank with his parents, and he now drinks a glass or two of wine or beer with Greg once or twice a month. (Tom and Greg's mother are divorced.)

I met Greg and his dad at a restaurant in La Jolla, Calif., where Tom runs a for-profit treatment center. After we were seated, I ordered a bottle of cabernet sauvignon, and the server asked for Greg's ID. "He's 17," Tom immediately said. He then asked the waiter if it would be O.K. if Greg drank with his approval. The waiter said no.

Greg seems like a typical teenager, which is to say he's enamored of green causes and a bit cocky. He also seems to have learned some lessons from drinking with his dad. "I went to a party as a freshman with all juniors," he recalls. "And there was one guy who was drinking, and he was chugging a bottle of Skyy. And they tried, 'Let's get the freshie drunk,' all that sort of stuff, and it just didn't seem that hard to me to say I wasn't going to drink."

Later in the meal, Tom raised the issue of how culture influences consumption. Kids from the Southern European countries of the Romance languages--France, Romania, Italy, Spain and Portugal--get drunk at about the same rate as American teens (or slightly less often) even though a typical kid in these countries can buy wine or beer in any shop from early adolescence. The Southern European model of moderate, supervised drinking within families seems to be the most promising approach, on the basis of the North Carolina study. Italy and Spain report very low rates of alcohol dependence or abuse (less than 1% and 2.8%, respectively) compared with the U.S., where the rate is 7.8%, slightly lower than France's 8.7%. (All the figures are from the World Health Organization.)