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Giving parents some spine in the battle of the booze

By Rob Moodie - posted Monday, 18 June 2007


Teenage birthday parties are supposed to be fun. Whether it is sweet 16, or effervescent 18 they should be joyful rites of passage. But they aren’t if, despite the best intentions of parents, the alcohol fuelled birthday party turns sour, with the birthday boy ending up in hospital with a busted face, or the birthday girl spewing up in a bucket.

Is this fiction, are they isolated incidents, or something that we merely accept as a societal rite of passage? Since regular measurement began in 1984 in our secondary schools, rates of binge drinking have gone up steadily for every age group, even for those as young as 12. The girls have caught up with, and in some aspects surpassed, the boys.

Advocates for a laissez-faire approach say that there can’t be a problem because overall alcohol consumption remains constant. While I agree that consumption has been fairly constant, we simply have some people drinking less, but we have a worrying, substantial and increasing proportion of people, young and old, drinking dangerously.

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One in five Victorians between the ages of 16-24 drink to get drunk, on most or every occasion they go out. And alcohol related hospitalisations have risen by 36 per cent in the last five years. Something is happening out there, and it isn’t getting better.

So what has happened in Victoria over the last 20 years? There is greater promotion of alcohol, much of which is very appealing to young people. Across Australia advertising for booze has risen by 10-15 per cent a year for the last few years, and it has become trickier and smarter (remember Boonie?).

There is no effective regulation of alcohol advertising, given that the Alcohol and Beverages Advertising Code is a toothless tiger. New products, in particular the sweet alcopops, targeted at the young female market have become runaway successes.

The availability of, and access to grog has increased at a rate of two new licences a day in Victoria since the mid 1980s. There are many more outlets per person in country areas of Victoria, and at the same time, according of Dr Anne-Marie Laslett at Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre, these country areas have much higher rates of alcohol-related hospitalisations, death, assaults and family violence.

The intensity of selling liquor has increased as large supermarket chains do battle with mega booze-only outlets to make alcohol ever more available and cheaper.

Twenty years ago we liberalised the licensing regime in Victoria to encourage the European-style drinking culture associated with dining and relaxation. In a large part that has happened, but at the same we’ve also expanded the binge drinking culture as well. A licence to sell alcohol given to a huge liquor outlet, as compared to a licence for a restaurant, will have completely different repercussions on local families, neighbourhoods and suburbs.

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Another very compelling reason for addressing binge drinking among young people is the scientific evidence about the damage alcohol can do to developing adolescent brains.

Adolescents can stay awake and drink for longer than adults, yet they are twice as susceptible to the effects of alcohol. Developing brains are more sensitive to learning and memory problems caused by toxic levels of alcohol. And age matters: children who start drinking before 15 are five times more likely to abuse alcohol than those who start at 21 or older.

At the same time we have deregulated our approach to alcohol, another cultural shift has occurred in our attitudes to parenting. We want to be friends with our teen-aged children, not only parents.

With more liberal attitudes to raising families, we don’t want to be seen as the “daggy” parents who forbid alcohol at our teenagers’ birthday parties. I think we have lost the plot, as we bend not only to the McDonald’s Drive-In pester power of four-year-olds, we tremble at the ferocity of the 16-year-old teenager’s accusation of being “uncool” parents.

And we worry that the other parents will think we’re backward too. Try talking to other parents and I can guarantee that the ones who really take an interest in their kids are worried too. So you aren’t alone.

Whether it is in Bendigo, Geelong, Casey, Colac, Darebin or Lara, parents and police are getting worried about increasing levels of under-age binge drinking, and the trauma and violence that inevitably come with it. How do we change our drinking culture to make it safer, particularly for our young people?

One suggestion that has been mooted recently is to prohibit alcohol being served to a minor unless authorised to do so by their parents, even if it’s in someone’s home. This is the law as it stands in New South Wales.

Geoff Munro, from the Community Alcohol Action Network says parents are dismayed when they discover that when their teenager arrives home very drunk from a party they have no legal remedy. He says they don’t believe you when you have to tell them the law says anyone can give an underage person as much alcohol as they like in a private home.

Do we need a law to prohibit the supply of alcohol to minors except if their own parent or guardian is present, like legislation currently before the Queensland Parliament? It may not take away a parent’s ability to serve their own children but it will restrict access to alcohol for some adolescents and decrease underage drinking.

Perhaps the most valuable effect will be to educate the community that alcohol is meant for adults and not for young people.

Such a law may give parents the capacity to negotiate with their children, to say “no” they don’t have to supply alcohol, and to have greater confidence that their children will be protected. It would also have the obligation that they, in turn, have to protect other people’s children.

Such a law should be more educative than punitive, and needs to be accompanied with public education to ensure parents are aware of their rights and responsibilities.

As for virtually all legislation, it is only part of the solution. If we are to make our drinking culture safer, then alcohol has to be promoted less, made more difficult to access by those at risk, and our suburbs and country towns can’t be left to drown in packaged liquor outlets.

And parents need help. We need some spine, assistance and encouragement to manage our teenagers’ induction and early years of drinking. This includes approaches such as delaying the onset of drinking, supervising their introduction to alcohol, drinking with them, modelling good drinking habits, talking with them, and not giving them money without knowing how they will use it.

It is important to be a parent first - to give our children solid and clear guidelines, rather than trying to be like a teenage friend to them. Parents can have positive influence on their children’s behaviour - and it is important to know our children’s friends and their parent’s attitudes to drinking.

This sort of educative, rather than punitive, legislation will be attacked as being a symptom of a “nanny state”. My response is that if we hadn’t had these long term and persistent increases in harmful and dangerous drinking levels in our young, and if we parents hadn’t wimped out, and if this hadn’t been accompanied by huge increases in access to, availability and promotion of alcohol (the “evil step-mother” state) then we wouldn’t need government intervention.

But free markets aren’t always free of some very negative effects. That’s why we have governments.

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First published in The Sunday Age on June 10, 2007.



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About the Author

Rob Moodie is Professor of Global Health at the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne. Between 1998 and 2007 he was the CEO of VicHealth. He is co-editor of three books, including Hands on Health Promotion. He is currently writing a book called Recipes for a Great Life with Gabriel Gate.

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