Why Scotland needs to put the demon back into drink

In fact, restoring the stigma that used to be associated with drunkenness would help create a healthier nation, and prevent a generation of young people from being harmed by the substance their parents adore.

In America, where I grew up, the legal drinking age is 21 and parents are not allowed to serve alcohol to children, even in their own homes. In Scotland, by contrast, parents can legally pour their children vodka from the age of five. A major study into teenage intoxication levels by the Pacific Institute found that compared with America, Scotland wins -- face down. Your children are two-and-a-half times more likely to get drunk and twice as likely to binge-drink as their American counterparts.

But enough smugness. America has its own cultural affectation which the Scots are welcome to ridicule -- guns. While most American college students can’t legally drink alcohol at university, Texas is considering a bill allowing undergraduates to bring their revolvers into the classroom. Utah and Colorado have already adopted similar laws. Pointing out to America the link between gun ownership and homicide does no good; guns are in their blood, culture and history, the way alcohol is in yours.

I’ve just written a book entitled Alcohol Nation. Although your country may be taking the first of her 12 steps on the road to recovery, mumbling: “My name is Scotland and I’m an alcoholic”, changing things for the better will require more than wringing your hands over teenage binge-drinking. In order to cut teenage drinking, Scotland’s adults must first take a cold hard look at themselves in the mirror and then book a collective appointment for a makeover.

I occasionally give health education talks in Scottish schools. Far from the cliché of the beer-bellied, tattooed pub-Dad passing on his favourite pastime to his offspring, I find that it is often middle-class parents living “very respectable” lives who are drinking too much at home or while socialising, and unwittingly setting a terrible example for their children. They return home drunk from parties, perhaps slurring their words when talking to the babysitter. They sit in front of the TV sipping large glasses of middle-class wine several nights of week. They say things like: “I could really do with a drink” or: “I could murder a pint.”

Children learn all kinds of things from their parents. They absorb our values and traditions. They also subliminally pick up adults’ attitudes towards drinking, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Even before their first taste, young children are learning about alcohol and about why their parents drink. They do this by seeing people drink, hearing them talk about it, even absorbing the smell of their parents’ favourite tipple. A study of children aged five to eight by the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia demonstrated that “whether they like the odour of beer depends not just on how often their mother drinks, but on why she drinks”.

The scientists identified mothers who drank to “escape”, for instance, to help them relax, deal with anxiety or cheer themselves up. Asked to choose between the smell of beer and rotten eggs, those mothers’ children were more likely than their peers to prefer the rotten eggs. Children, concluded the researchers, “are processing the smell of alcohol with the emotional reasons their mothers, and perhaps fathers, drink”.

The good news is that a parent’s attitude towards alcohol can also be harnessed as a powerful weapon against teenage drinking. In short, parental disapproval is good for child sobriety. There is a hideous misconception that banning alcohol and showing disapproval at teenagers’ drinking elevates alcohol to the status of a forbidden fruit. According to this theory, the best way to de-mystify alcohol is to let children drink it. By introducing the substance gradually, it’s argued, parents can help cultivate “sensible drinking” habits in their children.

This is nonsense and Scotland should know it, since the country’s tolerant approach to young people and alcohol has been an unmitigated disaster. A growing body of research confirms that the best way to prevent bingeing and alcohol problems in young people is by setting rules and boundaries around drinking. Parental disapproval is particularly useful in encouraging sobriety.

Last year, researchers from the Prevention Research and Methodology Center at Pennsylvania recommended that parents practise a zero-tolerance policy towards alcohol in the home. They argued that there is no basis for the theory that forbidding alcohol encourages abuse. Meanwhile, a study of 300 first-year university students found that those whose parents never allowed them to drink -- about half of the group -- were significantly less likely to indulge heavily at university, regardless of gender. A Dutch study of 428 families reached a similar conclusion, and advised parents to prohibit drinking “in any setting or on any occasion”.

On the other side of the world, a team of Australian researchers concluded that by adopting a disciplined approach to limiting children’s alcohol intake and showing disapproval of adolescent drinking, parents could help reduce their child’s drinking in later life. The same findings were recently reported by New Zealand’s National Addiction Centre.

Adolescents will, of course, always experiment with alcohol. But there was a time when we parents knew that our children were experimenting behind the bike shed; they knew that we knew what they were doing -- but they also knew that we didn’t condone it. We need to return to that situation. As parents, our values permeate our sons’ and daughters’ subconscious, regardless of what teenagers say.

But parental disapproval is even more powerful as a method of prevention and protection if it is supported by societal disapproval, not just of teenage drinking, but of drunkenness in general. The Bishop of Stafford recently defined alcohol as “one of the major sins of our time”. He has a point. It’s not that we should be demonising the alcohol itself as “the Devil’s buttermilk”. But perhaps it’s time Scotland re-stigmatised alcohol abuse as something shameful. After all, for a culture that once embraced the Calvinist spirit of temperance and exported it to America, getting in touch with your inner shame should come naturally.

This sentiment would be all the more effective if the stigma came with a generous serving of sexual inequality: heavy drinking and drunkenness being even more “shameful” for females. In retrospect these old-fashioned mores protected women from a profound biological inequality and vulnerability to the effects of alcohol. (For example women produce far less of the key enzymes which break down alcohol, thus protecting vital organs, cells and body tissue.) It would also help compensate for their heightened vulnerability to assault, rape, unwanted pregnancy, HIV and clinical depression through drink. Yes, girl power has had some terrible, unintended consequences for the girls.

What all this means in practice is that girls and adult women are far more easily affected both on the night and for years in the future by the alcohol they drink now. And a new generation of girls has to be brainwashed with this home truth to protect them from the growing menu of harm outlined above. What we really need is for the EU to devise a Man Pint and a Woman Pint, along with sexually unequal wine glasses: all of this to be accompanied by extra lashings of shame for females proudly “on the piss”. It would be a life-saving form of neochauvinism -- the new chivalry.

Where both genders are concerned, it is the role of adults -- particularly those in power -- not to necessarily do what young people are interested in but to do what is in young people’s best interests. Of course in any society, politicians want votes and campaign donations from the distillers. And so measures such as the SNP Government’s plan to introduce minimum alcohol pricing, and to make it harder for under-21s to buy alcohol, need to be supported -- despite counter-arguments by the SNP youth wing’s convener that such measures would fail because “Scotland’s dreadful relationship with alcohol is not restricted to young people -- it is a societal problem”.

To be absolutely clear: new medical evidence demands that we first consider youth drinking and adult drinking as entirely different matters. One of the greatest hindrances to addressing teenage drinking in Scotland has been the inability of adults to reconcile their beliefs about, and love of, alcohol with an entirely new understanding of its specific effects on upon children and young people. The effects on the young body, brain and genes of drinking even so-called moderate amounts have ramifications that reverberate for decades after a child’s first sip.

It is now known that although children legally become adults at 18, their brains don’t reach physical and functional maturity until their mid-20s. Or, as the US Department of Health now puts it: ‘‘The short and long-term consequences that arise from underage [21] alcohol consumption are astonishing in their range and magnitude … Underage drinking can cause alterations in the structure and function of the developing brain, which continues to mature into the mid to late 20s, and may have consequences reaching far beyond adolescence.”

All Scotland’s efforts to tackle teenage drinking must be designed with reference to these sobering facts, instead of being influenced by the arrogant and ignorant assumptions of adults who enjoy alcohol. In addition, minimum ages for drinking alcohol have to be seen for what they are -- cultural and political compromises, not accurate health guidelines. And we should bear in mind that while it is binge-drinking that dominates the headlines, other forms of alcohol misuse can damage young people’s health.

Nor should Scots listen to those who say that efforts to tackle youth drinking will result in a backlash. When the US federal government ordered all states to raise the legal drinking age to 21, the American alcohol lobby warned of a backlash which never came. There was, however, a marked drop in alcohol-related problems, and hundreds of thousands of lives were saved. In New Zealand, a new report from the prime minister’s chief science adviser declared that raising the drinking age to 21 and increasing alcohol prices are among the most effective ways to address youth drinking problems.

The alcohol industry, of course, claims that raising prices won’t change a nation’s harmful drinking habits. But their claims have been dismissed by the House of Commons Health Committee as “economic illiteracy”.

In a recent report, the committee described increasing alcohol prices as “the most powerful tool at the disposal of a government”. As for the notion that raising prices would unfairly affect the majority of moderate drinkers, this is dismissed by the report as “a myth widely propagated by parts of the drinks industry and politicians”. If Scotland introduces minimum pricing, the greatest impact will be on those who drink cheap alcohol, in particular young binge drinkers and low-income heavy drinkers who are at greatest risk of liver disease.

I am not proposing that Scotland should adopt a 21st-century temperance initiative. The prescription I propose is intended to ensure that we give our children time to develop a greater resilience to the effects of the alcohol so that they may cope better with alcohol as adults. It is about promoting health and development, not rekindling Victorian values.

Finally, secrecy and discretion have an important role in parenting, and while the much-lauded catchphrases of transparency and openness may resonate in terms of politicians and expenses scandals, they often have no place in parenting. Parents can continue to get drunk. But like many things you do without your children watching, from now on keep it to yourselves.

Alcohol Nation is published by Piatkus, £13.99. Dr Aric Sigman is a psychologist whose views on parenting are influential worldwide. The author of several books, including The Spoilt Generation -- which argued that a failure of adult authority is failing our youth -- and Remotely Controlled: How Television Is Damaging Our Lives, he is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and the British Psychological Society and a hands-on father of four children.