And debunk the French drinking myth that early alcohol exposure prevents future alcohol issues.
Children’s doctors in the United Kingdom must take a much stronger and more visible role in preventing future addiction issues by, among other things, spreading the message to raise the legal drinking age for children at home from 5, argues an independent health education lecturer in an online personal viewpoint published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Dr. Aric Sigman says they need to do a lot more to teach parents about the possible harms of exposing children to alcohol at a young age. This includes busting the French family drinking myth that acculturation in childhood leads to responsible drinking as an adult. There isn’t.
He says that figures from the World Health Organization show that people in France drink more alcohol, lose more years of life, and that alcohol is responsible for 26% more deaths than in the UK.
In response to these alarming statistics, the French government has decided to “denormalize” alcohol consumption by raising the drinking age and taking other measures to reduce the negative impact alcohol has on public health.
Alcohol is especially problematic for young people, the author notes. Globally, it is the biggest risk factor for premature death and disability among 15-49 year olds, and it is a cause of more than 200 disease and injury conditions, including “staggering increases in liver disease mortality over the past 40 years, especially in the UK,” he notes.
He believes that delaying the age at which children and young people have their first drink, even if it is only a small sip, may reduce their eventual chance of becoming problem drinkers.
According to preliminary study, exposing kids to alcohol may make them more susceptible to addiction by causing neuroadaptations in the parts of their brains responsible for addiction and reward. He continues by saying that teen drinking may also modify how genes are expressed, which may have an impact on how people will drink as adults.
“A more visible position by the paediatric profession is required which wrests ownership from that of alcohol initiation being a cultural issue to being a formal medical issue presided over by paediatric medicine—not the national culture,” he maintains.
Parents can learn about role modeling from doctors. Children who witness their parents drink, like tobacco, are more prone to attempt it themselves, including using alcohol to ‘self medicate,’ he adds.
And, he argues, doctors can emphasize the alcohol industry’s ‘normalizing’ influence on school teaching materials such as lesson plans, fact sheets, and videos through their charities, youth education programs, and education trusts.
Along with mandatory warnings on all alcohol products and health promotion materials, they can lobby the government to raise the at-home drinking age from 5 — not as a means of “to criminalise parents, but as a signal to reset the alcohol cultural landscape through formal gesture.” He suggests that doing this may lower children’s lifetime risk of developing alcohol use disorders.
“It is time we join the dots and take a far broader and more long-term approach to prevent and reduce future alcohol-related morbidity and mortality,” he adds.
“The paediatric profession has the respect and the authority to tell society not what it is interested in hearing, but what is in its children’s best interests.”
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