Giving parents some spine in the battle of the booze

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.