Dani Garavelli: Here’s to an adult take on teenagedrinking

I WAS less than ten years old when I had my first alcoholic beverage, a little bit of red wine topped up with lemonade so it looked like fizzy Ribena.

I don’t remember the occasion, but it would have been a birthday or Christmas or other celebration because we weren’t a family who cracked a bottle open every night.

Later, as a young adult, I drank way too much. I seemed to spend half my life in the union bar downing vodka and limes for 70p a go, and I continued in that vein more or less until I was in my late twenties (although my taste in alcohol became more sophisticated and the cost of my habit increased over the years).

Now, a researcher of the type that says breastfed babies do better at school, ergo breastmilk increases brainpower, might look at these two facts and conclude that my early contact with alcohol was linked to my excessive intake later in life, but they’d be wrong.

In my opinion – and I’m pretty confident about this – the reason I started over-imbibing was because, at the age of 17, I left my Italian-influenced home where the odd glass of vino was viewed as life-enhancing and went off to a Scottish university, where several pints of Snakebite was viewed as the baseline for the tamest night out and where regularly making it into double figures would guarantee you no particular notoriety. The fact I continued long after most people have settled down to a life of sobriety had more to do with my choice of profession than with the pre-pubescent awakening of my tastebuds to the fruity notes of Lambrusco.

In fact, and this is a bit controversial, if I had had more experience of drinking before I left home, I might have learned to monitor my intake; to recognise the crucial point at which alcohol turned me from the life and soul of the party to a stroppy cow or morose whinger. Faced with the odd disapproving look or dressing down, I might have exercised a degree of self-control.

That’s why, when I read surveys like the one published last week by Drinkaware, which suggested the average age parents allow their children to have an alcoholic drink is 13, I’m far from scandalised. Even though I think that’s a little young to be knocking back entire glasses, I understand the damage limitation exercise these families have embarked on.

In an ideal world, perhaps, nothing but water would pass our sons and daughters’ lips until their 21st birthdays. But they are growing up in a society fixated by alcohol. They see it all around them – at social functions, in parks, on advertising billboards. Radio DJs boast about their previous night’s antics on their breakfast shows and their friends trade stories about how “wasted” they’ve been on Facebook. They’re bound to wonder what it’s all about. Isn’t it better that alcohol should be demystified at home than that they should be smuggling it out of the house to down on a park bench with their mates?

Of course there are limits. I’m talking about parents choosing to give their teenager the odd drink because they think it will help them adopt a mature attitude, not allowing them unfettered access to the drinks cabinet so they can fix themselves a stiff one after a hard day at school, or giving them money for a six-pack down the off-licence when they’re heading out to a football match.

You think I jest. But the same study found some parents are actively encouraging excessive drinking. Drinkaware says that during a crackdown in Newquay last year more than 70 per cent of drunk teenagers stopped by police had been given the alcohol by their parents. According to the charity’s departing chief executive, Chris Sorek, parents were dropping off their 15 and 16-year-olds to celebrate the end of their GCSEs with a tent, sleeping bags and a crate of beer. Suffering the jealous restlessness of middle-age, some parents seem determined to relive their own misspent youth through their children, creating an air of expectation by talking up their drink-fuelled adventures.

Having realised, somewhat belatedly, how much of my commitment-free young life I squandered drinking for the sake of it, I have no desire to see my children follow in my footsteps alcohol-wise. Indeed, if there was one single message I could communicate to them it would be that there is nothing attractive/clever/liberating about drinking so much that you become unintelligible and that there are better ways to fritter away time than by rehashing the same old stories in the same old darkened hovels.

Instinct tells me this won’t be achieved by delivering a lecture; nor by issuing diktats. So, if and when alcohol becomes an issue, I will probably allow my children – who have already tasted wine, but are so far not greatly interested in it – to drink a limited amount at home where I can keep an eye on them.

But I will do so in the hope rather than the expectation it will have a moderating effect on their eventual alcohol consumption. The brutal fact is that whether they adopt a zero-tolerance or a liberal approach, parents only have so much influence. Whether or not our children drink depends on so much more – their own personalities, peers and the culture they’re embedded in. And, as much as we want them to learn from our mistakes, sometimes they have to make their own.