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Teen Drinking and Parental Responsibility
THE SOURCE Madison, Connecticut weekly newspaper May 2005

Recent news items feature the fact that drinking among Madison's high school population has become pronounced. It is certainly true that the town is not markedly different from many other affluent towns throughout the country in this regard.

Teens normally test the range of the permissible as they approach adulthood and this process often comes into direct conflict with the interests of the community. Alcohol consumption is viewed as a status activity by teens who are anxious to gain the approval and admiration of their peers. When alcohol is consumed by youngsters, behavior often becomes reckless and the interests of the community, especially regarding safety, are threatened.

To address this issue, the regulation of alcohol consumption in public spaces is implemented by state, county and local statutes, regulations and ordinances. Consumption of alcohol in private spaces remains out of the reach of government and is properly assigned to the role of parental supervision. Public management of alcohol consumption is reasonably uniform while there seems to be considerable variation in private homes regarding its use.

Another key factor is that community regulations pertaining to alcohol use by minors extend primarily to the sale and possession of the substance. Therefore, the use of alcohol is presumably the responsibility of parents while sale and possession are the business of the community government.

Recent attempts to link the private and public sectors is seen in the ordinance prohibiting the provision of alcohol to persons under twenty one who are not the children of a homeowner. For Madison and a growing list of towns in Connecticut, this is decidedly a step in the right direction.

In theory this arrangement probably makes conceptual sense but in the realm of real world living, the private and public sectors rarely remain separate and often come into conflict. When teenagers consume too much alcohol in a private home and then drive a car the interests of the two sectors come into conflict. Matters such as this will then become the business of the civil or criminal court and the insurance companies for disposition.

Plausibly, conflict between the private and public sector might be minimized if the two shared a common understanding of the effects of alcohol on adolescents. If the private sector, those who live in the community and pay taxes there, were able to adopt a common understanding of why alcohol and adolescence do not mix, the community as a whole would be safer and more stable.

The adolescent is "a work in progress" in the sense that his emotional, social and physical development is roughly mid way between childhood and adulthood. The brain undergoes continuous development as the individual proceeds from childhood to adulthood and those mechanisms which regulate the responsible use of alcohol are simply not present in teenagers. Adolescents bring a litany of unresolved emotional and social issues into the drinking experience and these become exacerbated or magnified when alcohol enters the immature brain. The normally impulsive and unpredictable youngster becomes even more unstable when immature brain regulatory mechanisms fail to control the impact of alcohol flooding the brain tissues. Failure to appreciate the effects of ingested alcohol often leads to the expression of self destructive, aggressive, and inappropriate sexual impulses often with profound impacts on the youngster, his family and the community.

The use of alcoholic beverages has been a social mainstay in western societies for centuries and this continues to the present time. The use of alcohol is an institutionalized part of most social occasions in our communities and typically does not lead to negative developments because those indulging are adults and able therefore to drink responsibly. It is often pointed out that young children typically drink wine during family dinners in certain European countries and that no serious social problems occur as a result. Common sense should indicate that once these children reach their teen years they have already developed responsible attitudes regarding the use of alcohol as a result of strict family supervision and responsible community regulation. Another important consideration is that in these cultures the ingestion of wine within the family setting has been part of the cultural fabric for centuries and has assumed strict familial regulation.

Noteworthy is the fact that there are strict prohibitions on the use of alcohol by all persons living in Islamic Eastern societies encompassing large land areas of the civilized world. Clearly, those societies have their share of social and economic problems but soaring addiction rates and related social ills are not among them.

In this country, the folly of attempting to eliminate the use of alcohol was demonstrated by the failure of that experiment in social engineering called prohibition. This is an example of what might happen when national policy falls into the hands of extremists. The attempt to eliminate alcohol from our social fabric led to escalating violence, corruption, the growth of an underground alcohol based economy, the loss of probably billions in tax revenues, and finally had to be repealed.

The realities are such that alcohol will continue to be a part of our social and community life and that as citizens of the community, we need to make major adjustments in our thinking about alcohol consumption among our youngsters. We need to become involved in seriously reconsidering how we deal with alcohol consumption in our homes, the attitudes we convey to our children about drinking, the importance of observing public regulations on the consumption of alcohol and equally importantly, in the process of understanding how alcohol affects the young and communicating that understanding to our children.

Regarding respecting local regulations dealing with public consumption of alcohol, strict observance of prevailing ordinances is integral to instilling acceptance of community standards into our youngsters' value systems. We do our youngsters absolutely no favor when we remind them about not drinking at their beach parties and then proceed to break out the wine, liquor or beer with our picnic meals on the green during a summer concert. The local ordinances state that consumption of alcohol at such events and in such places is prohibited. No local entity or institution sponsoring these events should tolerate infractions of the ordinances and the police administration should not hesitate to enforce the rules.

Citizens of our communities need to form common understandings of and positions regarding the use of alcohol among the young. We then must partner with the elected and appointed guardians of the public sector to develop responsible policies aimed at reversing the troubling trends of increased drinking, and the myriad of medical, legal and social ills that result.

In order to successfully coordinate public policy and private or parental management of adolescent drinking, parents need to take the issue seriously and not assume that their children are immune from alcohol abuse. It is essential that parents take an ongoing interest in the social lives of their teenagers and not to be averse to asking direct questions about alcohol use. Clear and consistent positions regarding alcohol use must be maintained and alcohol use in the home by teenagers expressly forbidden. Clear and consistent prohibitions about drinking in the public sector need to be explained in the home with firm consequences to be expected if a youngster violates those prohibitions.

The prohibitive position taken by parents regarding alcohol consumption by teenagers should extend to family dinners inside the home and apply equally during celebratory occasions outside the home.

In other words, it is proposed that parentally managed drinking behavior in the private domain be coordinated with publicly managed restrictions on the sale and possession of alcoholic beverages. The confusion between the expectations of the private and public sectors permits the teenager to find opportunities to experiment with and possibly abuse alcohol.

Parents who honestly look at their own alcohol consumption patterns inside the home and determine that these might be sending the wrong messages to teenagers, need to adjust those patterns and adopt strict and clear rules to govern their own behavior. Parents who host house parties where they or their guests drink to access in front of children are failing in their parental responsibilities.

Parents who themselves drink to excess, even infrequently, must consider the high probability that their children will be at higher than average risk for developing alcohol related problems. These individuals must obtain the necessary treatment for themselves and pay close attention to the social interests and behavior of their children. Those parents having close relatives with alcohol abuse histories also need to pay especially close attention to the social interests of their children. Since available evidence indicates that alcoholism and alcohol abuse are in large part genetically driven, parents with such family histories need to be especially frank with their children about their "at-riskness" and do so as soon as children are able to understand such notions.

The middle and high school years normally feature growing interest in socialization outside the home and family and today constitute the occasion for the development of alcohol consumption behavior in the young. It is essential that when these teens socialize parents make every effort to provide supervision and stand ready to take whatever measures as may be necessary to prevent alcohol becoming available to adolescents.

Parents who allow "keg parties" at graduations or on other occasions and justify such irresponsibility by removing car keys and providing sleeping arrangements for teenagers are simply not being realistic about responsibly dealing with the teen substance abuse issue. Presumably ordinances regulating the provision of alcohol on private property to persons less than twenty one years of age in the growing list of Connecticut towns will help to mitigate the spread of such inappropriate and dangerous behavior.

Parents of teenage youngsters have the responsibility of informing themselves appropriately about adolescent drinking issues and to the extent possible, join in local efforts to address problem drinking among youngsters. Madison's Selectmen's Council on Youth Substance Abuse provides an excellent opportunity to become productively involved in addressing this growing community problem.

Richard Tomanelli, Ph.D.
Psychologist
36 Overshore Drive East
Madison, Connecticut 06443
203 245 7582

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