Should I Let My Teen Drink in My Presence?

Why You Shouldn’t Condone Teen Drinking

Picture this: It’s New Year’s Eve. The ball just dropped. You’ve just popped open a bottle of champagne. Your adult friends and family members stand around you, glasses out, and you fill them one by one. Last in line is your teen. Spirits are high, and you think “One glass won’t hurt.”

Now it’s Easter. At the family dinner, there’s ham, potatoes, red wine, and all the fixings. You notice your teen has helped themself to a glass. You lean over and confront them, respectfully, and they explain that it’s just one glass, it makes the food more enjoyable, everyone else is doing it, and they can handle it. You reluctantly allow it. They drink two glasses.

Later that summer, you are grabbing their laundry out of their room. In the bottom of their closet, you notice two of your beers, taken from the family fridge. That one glass on New Years has evolved into a series of gradual changes in your teen’s relationship with alcohol.

The cold hard truth is that alcohol is a toxin that can lead to a host of negative effects over the course of a lifetime. This fact can be hard to reconcile with society’s general acceptance and celebration of drinking. As for the adage, “the dosage makes the poison,” it is important to understand that any amount of alcohol is unhealthy.1 While the long-term deleterious effects of alcohol are indeed worsened by heavier drinking, any kind of alcohol consumption during adolescence comes with risks, and to condone teen drinking is to condone these risks.

Short-Term Health Effects & Risks

Alcohol is a depressant that alters the effects of chemicals in the brain and central nervous system (CNS), causing feelings of sedation, confidence, well-being, and disinhibition alongside many other physiological changes. These include altered vision, hypertension, and hormone dysregulation. In addition, alcohol impacts cognitive function globally, impairing decision-making, impulse control, sense of danger, psychomotor skills, reaction time, and memory formation.2,3

The low body weight, weak tolerance, and inexperience associated with most teens mean that even relatively small amounts of alcohol can cause effects more pronounced than they would be for an adult.

More specifically, the cognitive impairments of acute alcohol use can result in the following risky or illegal behaviors:

• Impaired driving or riding with an impaired driver
• Experimentation with harsher substances
• Irresponsible sexual activity
• Embarrassing or reputation-damaging choices
• Blackouts
• Alcohol poisoning (i.e., overdose)
• Trespassing, vandalism, shoplifting, and other petty crimes
• Fighting

Long-Term Health Effects & Risks

The long-term risks of habitual alcohol consumption during adolescence can be even more insidious. Current research indicates that teen alcohol consumption has the potential to cause profound and wide-ranging effects on the brain and body, and later life health outcomes are poorer for teens who drink.4

To put it simply, the brain comprises gray matter, which processes and interprets information, and white matter, which interconnects and sends signals throughout regions of gray matter and the CNS. The brain grows to its full size in childhood, but brain development is constant and ongoing through the age of 25 or longer. Adolescence is one of the most critical periods of refinement in both gray and white brain matter.5 As such, a 30-year-old’s brain is generally much more efficient than, say, a 12-year-old’s at performing higher-order cognitive functions like working memory, reasoning, self-control, and planning. However, this refinement requires brain development to remain relatively unimpeded.

Chronic alcohol use accelerates gray matter volume loss and diminishes white matter density, volume, and integrity in developing adolescent brains.6 In short, teen drinking can negatively alter brain structure, and this may be only partially reversible or irreversible altogether. These alterations can result in functional deficits. 

These Include: 

• Reduced information-processing speed
• Learning disabilities
• Dysphasia (a language disorder)
• Emotional and mood dysfunctions
• Impulse control problems
• Impaired reward sensitivity
• Increased susceptibility to alcohol addiction

Finally, teenage drinking before puberty suppresses key genes and hormones, causing delayed onset, osteoporosis, height and weight issues, hypogonadism, and numerous other conditions.7,8

Dispelling Myths About Teen Drinking

Myth #1: Teens will drink anyway.

Is it possible that they will drink anyway? Yes. Is it inevitable? No. Drinking alcohol is often much more desirable before one learns about the harm it can cause. Teens are smart, and showing them the science behind how alcohol could permanently damage their development might delay their desire to drink at least until their adult years.

Alcohol’s toxicity makes drinking it self-sabotaging for a teen. The strongest foundation to prevent your teen’s desire to drink—and thereby self-sabotage—is promoting their self-love and self-worth. If they love themselves and know about alcohol’s dangers, they won’t want to drink. 

On the one hand, if your teen has strong self-worth but is interested in alcohol, they may not understand how harmful alcohol can truly be. On the other hand, if your teen knows about the dangers of alcohol but still expresses interest, this might be a sign that they struggle with self-worth and self-love.

Myth #2: Teens should be taught to drink responsibly at home.

Teens shouldn’t drink at all, and the most responsible approach to drinking is complete abstinence.

Myth #3: If teens drink at home, they won’t drive drunk or ride with drunk drivers.

Allowing your teen to drink at home instead of, say, letting them go get drunk at a party, might keep them ‘safe’ for that single instance. However, normalizing alcohol use and fostering a drinking habit worsens their long-term risk of making poor decisions while intoxicated, including driving. Those who don’t drink don’t drive drunk.

Moreover, your teen should always feel safe and secure calling you for nonpunitive help if they feel forced to either drink and drive or ride with someone who has been drinking. If you punish them for making the best decision in a bad situation, they might make a worse decision next time. To not punish them isn’t meant to reward them for ending up in dangerous situations; it’s meant to keep them alive.

Myth #4: In some countries, teens can drink at 16 or 18, so it’s okay.

It’s legal in those countries, but legality and ethicality are two different measures. Current evidence strongly indicates that teen drinking harms the brain and body, sometimes irreversibly. Permitting your teen to permanently damage themselves because other countries permit it doesn’t make it ethical. Also, it’s not legal in the U.S.

Myth #5: Teenage drinking worsens under strict parenting styles.

Overly strict parenting styles can lead to rebellious behaviors in teens. However, preventing your teen from making life-altering bad decisions doesn’t have to be accompanied by harshness, unreasonableness, and authoritarian control. These characteristics often instill the very traits that lead to acts of rebellion, such as disrespect for authority, low self-esteem and self-confidence, and an urge to self-sabotage. 

Reasons like “because I said so” aren’t productive and can undermine your teen’s respect for your authority and guidance. Even if you feel they aren’t capable of understanding and making healthy decisions, they ultimately need to learn how and why to sidestep drinking, rather than simply assent to micromanagement. Basing your authority on sound reasoning and love is key.

Myth #6: Letting teens drink reduces the appeal of sneaking alcohol and being rebellious.

Alcohol has a high potential for addiction and dependence, which dominate a person’s judgment and priorities. In theory, letting your teen drink would reduce their immediate need to sneak alcohol, but once an addiction forms and cravings start, any limits you set on their consumption go out the window. If they want more than you allow, their only resources are subterfuge and rebellion. The best way to keep them from wanting more than you allow is to keep them from wanting any at all.