Alcohol Abuse

Summary of Underage Drinking Facts

• Research shows that when parents give alcohol to kids, those children are more likely to get into alcohol-related trouble and they’re more likely to drink to get drunk than other young people. Giving kids a drink—even with the best of educational intentions—actually increases their risk.

• Europe, where the legal drinking age is 18, has more alcoholism, young people binge drinking, injury, rape, and school problems due to alcohol than America. Since alcohol is more available there, it actually increased the proportion of kids who drink in Europe.

• The research is very clear though on why the legal drinking age in the US is 21— the brain is still developing until the mid-twenties and this puts adolescents at an increased risk to the effects of alcohol. 

• When alcohol consumption interferes with this early adult brain development, the potential for chronic problems such as greater risk for alcohol addiction, dangerous risk-taking behavior, reduced decision-making ability, memory loss, depression, violence and suicide is greater, according to US Department of Human Health and Services.

• In addition, the part of the brain that enables a person to think clearly, make good decisions and control impulses isn’t developed until the mid-twenties. This is the part of the brain that says “Wait! This is a bad idea.” As Psychologist Laurence Steinberg sees it, a teenager’s brain “has a well-developed accelerator but only a partly developed brake.” This helps explain why when teens drink alcohol, 90% of the time they are binge drinking.

• Youth who begin drinking before the age of 15 have a 41 percent chance of future alcohol dependence, compared with a 10 percent chance for those who begin after the legal drinking age. Some become dependent during adolescence.

• In addition, when teens feel they have their parents’ approval to drink, they drink more and more often when they are not with their parents 

• Adolescents who were allowed to drink were more likely to have transitioned quickly from their first drink to consuming 5 or more drinks at one time and to drinking heavily 3 or more times in the past year. Given well-documented harms of adolescent heavy drinking, these results do not support the idea that parents allowing children to drink alcohol inoculates them against alcohol misuse.