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Soaking in alcohol myths

The old belief of drinking with your children to educate them about responsible alcohol use is a myth but parents don’t want to hear, researchers say. Catherine Hubbard reports.

Gone are the days when well-intentioned parents could sit down with a glass of wine with their teens in a bid to teach responsible drinking, say alcohol researchers and educators.

The messaging now is that alcohol should be avoided ‘‘at all costs’’ with young people, says Paul Dillon, the director and founder of Drug and Alcohol Research and Training Australia.

The Mediterranean model, in which children drank alcohol with their civilised parents seemingly without negative consequences has been proven to be a myth – as alcohol abuse rates in Europe have been found to be as high or even higher than in New Zealand.

Dillon said studies had shown that alcohol reduced the size of the hippocampus of developing brains and consumption ‘‘robs teens of their potential’’.

He said getting this message out to Kiwi parents was like ‘‘hitting your head against a brick wall’’. The author, educator and social commentator presented to students from 160 schools last year. He has also given talks at New Zealand schools.

‘‘The kind of messages that we now give parents around this area have changed dramatically,’’ he said. ‘‘What we now know is that alcohol should be avoided at all costs with young people. The message now is ‘delay, delay, delay’ – try to delay your child’s first drink for as long as you can.’’

It is a message he describes as very difficult to sell to parents for a ‘‘whole pile of reasons’’.

Many parents drank themselves when they were younger and felt that they escaped unscathed.

Another reason, Dillon said, was simply because it was hard.

‘‘Realistically, if your child wants to drink, you can lock them in a cellar and they are still going to find alcohol if they really want to.’’ He still wants parents to understand that providing alcohol for teens to take to parties on a Saturday night is not a good idea.

‘‘What we researchers found is that when you give them alcohol, it is not protective, it actually does the reverse – it just means that when they finish those drinks, they go and seek more.’’

Alcohol, he said, caused a loss of function in the developing brain.

Studies have shown some teenagers using alcohol have significantly smaller brain volumes, and lower density within the hippocampus and key prefrontal areas.

‘‘The way I like to describe it is that it robs young people of some of their future potential, particularly [in] the hippocampus, the part of the brain that deals with learning and memory.

‘‘The earlier you start drinking, we know that the more problems you will have in the future.

‘‘If you talk to people who drink a lot, they usually started drinking at an earlier age.’’

Trying to get that message out to Kiwi parents was difficult.

After giving talks here, Dillon said parents would approach him afterwards and argue about the message, trying to convince him that giving alcohol to teens was a better tactic.

The good news is that in the UK, Europe and Australia, researchers are seeing a growing number of non-drinking teenagers.

In Australia for example, in 1999 one in 10 aged 12-17 years were non-drinkers, a figure that had risen dramatically to one in three in 2017, Dillon said.

In Europe, that figure has gone from one in 10 to one in five.

‘‘It is a cultural shift. In this country, it has got to do with the social acceptance,’’ Dillon explained.

In the past, non-drinkers would be like a ‘‘Nigel no mates’’. Those attitudes have changed.

‘‘In fact, if you are a nondrinker, you look after other people, you are a valued member of a social group. And it is kind of like a trickle-down effect from designated drivers.’’

Nelson Bays Primary Health youth alcohol and other drug clinician Jay Blazek has also had enough of the myths around drinkers in the Mediterranean.

‘‘All the time that I was growing up, people said, ‘Well, young kids drink in Italy and France and Germany and look at them. Everything seems so fine over there’. That is just simply not true,’’ said Blazek, who spends 80% of his time working in schools. Actually, he said, if you looked at the statistics, the alcohol abuse rates or misuse

disorder rates are higher in those countries than in New Zealand, or America for that matter. Blazek grew up in Wisconsin, home to many German Americans skilled at making beer.

There, if the professional baseball team Milwaukee Brewers hit a home run, the mascot slipped down a swimming pool slide into a two-storey stein of beer with 60,000 people celebrating and watching.

‘‘As a 5-year-old, you are like: what’s not to like about this?’’ he said.

‘‘In the culture that I grew up in, there was never one word about the fact that this stuff could ruin your life. It was cheap, it was accessible, it was highly promoted.

‘‘It was a major industry and it was associated with everything fun in life. You almost had to find out for yourself the hard way that there could be issues around it.’’

Alcohol, he said, was like the last taboo.

‘‘No-one ever talks about it. It is probably the biggest health problem in society, that doesn’t really get addressed [anywhere] near the extent that it should be.’’

Blazek said the teenage brain was more susceptible to addiction than in any other stage of life, so much so that three-quarters of the people that develop addiction in New Zealand will be ‘‘well on their way’’ by the time they are 20 years old.

The difficulty in stopping that was that developmentally, teens were trying to establish some independence and ‘‘push away’’ from their parents.

‘‘You are trying to find your tribe,’’ he said.

‘‘There is an incredible amount of pressure both internally and externally to fit in somewhere, and if that involves hanging around with the cool people or older boys who have access to alcohol and fast cars, it is hard to fight and some people struggle mightily with it.’’

Blazek said part of his job was actually helping youth identify that there were impacts – that might be obvious to parents, teachers, friends and girlfriends, but that the user themselves could not see.

They could be a long time coming – while drugs like methamphetamine or cocaine caused people to spiral out of control very quickly, sometimes it could take decades for alcohol to ruin lives.

Problems with alcohol ran in families – genetic predisposition was ‘‘huge’’, children that had been exposed to trauma, which could be verbal, physical or sexual, were at risk, as were those with low level anxiety and depression.

‘‘Young people don’t run to the doctor. They tend to try to work it out themselves a lot,’’ Blazek said.

‘‘Alcohol use is often a symptom of other things.’’

With the introduction of beer and wine sales into supermarkets, alcohol harms had increased significantly, he said.

Dillon said if you tried to stop children drinking altogether, you would be doomed to fail.

His messages of eating before drinking and downing a glass of water before the first drink of the night have proven popular on social media such as Instagram.

But progress is likely to take decades rather than years.

‘‘We are fighting a culture here ... I think you are only going to see a cultural change over generations,’’ he said.

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2022-05-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281968906310635

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