A clash of cultures in drink use

Dinner time and the table is set, food is being dished up, and there's the welcome clink of glass as the first sip of chilled white wine is taken . . . by everyone, including the children.

It's a scene common on the Continent, where youngsters are taught from an early age how to drink wine with their meals - watered down to begin with - and to be sensible with their alcohol intake.

Yet in Britain the very idea of allowing a youngster to have a glass of wine or beer at a meal, would make many parents gasp in astonishment.

But a new study suggests those who allow their children to have alcohol may actually be encouraging them to drink sensibly in the future. The study of more than 10,000 15 and 16-year-olds found that those given alcohol by their parents were less likely to binge-drink or drink in public places or on the street.

As a result, the report's authors have suggested parents of teenagers replace peer pressure to drink dangerously with positive role models for sensible alcohol consumption.

It's a move which some of Edinburgh's Mediterranean citizens believe would work. Josephine Williams, a 23-year-old waitress at Cafe St Honore in Thistle Street Lane, who was raised in France between the ages of ten and 16, says there are benefits to being given alcohol at a young age.

"When I was about 12 I was allowed to drink wine, although it was very small amounts, and it was really to get you used to the taste more than anything," she says.

"It was always on the dinner table, though. I was shocked when I came back to Britain and saw how people my age were drinking, and getting really drunk.

"There is no real binge-drinking problem in France, and I think if I have children I will try to introduce them to alcohol in the same way my parents did with me. Here there is a very unhealthy attitude towards alcohol."

However, Philip Contini, managing director of the Valvona and Crolla delicatessen, is less sure. Now 53, he was raised in the Italian wine culture, with his parents giving him his first taste of wine when he was six.

He has raised his two children Francesca, 26, and Olivia, 11, in the same way, but does not believe simply introducing children to alcohol at a young age is the answer to ridding Scotland of binge-drinking.

"In Italy, wine is the culture, he says. "Rich and poor are all brought up drinking wine, and for us it is like breathing. My family were in the wine business and when I was six or seven, every Sunday when the new deliveries arrived I would be offered a taste.

"My father would teach me about it, telling me to look at it, to see if it was cloudy or clear, and if it was clear it was OK to drink.

In my family, no one ever got drunk, we were so used to wine.

"When I was older and went out with my Scottish friends to the pub on Friday night, I was shocked. They would get absolutely blootered, and I just didn't want to do that." The idea of giving children an early taste of alcohol is one which Jack Law, chief executive of Alcohol Focus Scotland and a member of the Scottish Ministerial Advisory Committee on Alcohol Problems, has already suggested. He believes the practice would cut binge-drinking among youngsters by taking the mystery out of alcohol.

"It's all about enabling them to feel part of a positive social experience," he says.

Certainly something has to change. A major Scottish Executive study of children aged between 12 and 15 found that 51 per cent admitted to drinking alcohol when they were around 13, and the figure rose to 84 per cent by the time they were 15.

Professor Mark Bellis - director of Liverpool John Moores University's centre for public health, and lead author of the latest report - says the ability to drink sensibly has to be learned.

"By the age of 15, the vast majority of young people are already using alcohol and this study suggests those who do so with their parents are more likely to avoid the most dangerous drinking behaviours," he says.

But Bellis believes the more Mediterranean approach to drinking alcohol, while desirable, is "unlikely ever to develop in the UK unless parents demonstrate such behaviours and help develop them in their children".

Philip Contini agrees and adds: "There are big cultural differences which I think have to be looked at, and simply giving kids a taste of alcohol at an early age is not like some kind of vaccine against binge-drinking.

"In Scotland it is the culture to drink heavily, it's in the blood. It might be worth experimenting with giving children wine at young age, but there is the chance it could make things worse."

Scotsman