Despite years of zero-tolerance messages from government and prevention groups, many parents choose to allow their children to drink at home while stressing themes of moderation and responsibility, the Los Angeles Times reported Dec. 31.Anecdotal evidence suggests that the practice is widespread, but the idea of 'home schooling' kids about alcohol use is infrequently discussed among alcohol educators. "I cannot come out and say that we can teach responsible drinking -- I would be at major risk from an institutional perspective for saying that -- but what I can say is that there is at least some evidence that by providing alcohol in a protected environment within the context of a meal, perhaps, we can at least minimize the excitement of it," said researcher Kristie Foley of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "But you would never get funding for a project like that, not in our current political climate."
Foley, however, did get a study published last year in the Journal of Adolescent Health that concluded that "parents who provided alcohol to their adolescent children or drank with them were more likely to have children who neither regularly used nor abused alcohol."
Conventional wisdom dictates that youths from Mediterranean Europe, who use alcohol at home from an early age, have healthier attitudes toward drinking. But some studies have shown that young Europeans tend to drink more and get drunk more than American teens.
"You're putting your finger on a pretty controversial issue in the field," said Joel Grube, director of the PIRE Prevention Research Center. "First of all, it is illegal, but there are researchers and others who believe that what you need to do is teach young people how to drink safely."
One supporter of this harm-reduction approach to alcohol education is psychologist Stanton Peele. "Every civilized non-psychotic human being has offered their children alcohol," said Peele. "We always approach appetitive behaviors in a moralistic and restrictive way: don't do drugs, don't smoke, don't drink."
George Hacker, director of the alcohol policies project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said parents' main goal should be to set a good example for their children about drinking. "I don't think there ought to be general rules on the topic. That should be left to individual parents," he said. "If that were to become the norm, I think there would be substantial problems because a lot of parents don't really know much about alcohol either, and training kids to drink in the home will probably not have that much effect on the kids' drinking outside the home, which is where most of it occurs."
Added Hacker: "When you adopt the thinking that teaching people to drink is important, that's already, I think, down a slippery slope that suggests drinking is important, everybody does it. It's a pro-drinking message in and of itself."
Many states carve out an exception to their drinking laws for underage youths who consume alcohol with their parents at home. "There is no statute that says a parent or guardian is precluded from serving, say, a 17-year-old individual a glass of wine," said David Labahn, executive director of the California District Attorneys Association. "As you go down in age, some medical professionals might say that furnishing alcohol is detrimental to the child's development, and that could be child endangerment or contributing to the delinquency of a minor."
College student Jen Sherwin, a child of California winemakers, said she found that kids at school who had grown up in the most restrictive environments tended to get into the most trouble with alcohol. "It was absolutely insane. There was a lot of alcohol poisoning, a lot of kids had to get their stomachs pumped. People would drink 24/7," she said. "I had other friends up there from Napa Valley who didn't go overboard either, because we are used to being around wine, and the freedom of being able to drink wasn't overwhelming to us."
Boston University School of Public Health 
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