By Rosalie Goldberg
Twenty-one years old. That elusive age, when finally, you can try alcohol. You can sit in a bar, watch the game, and have a drink — a fantastic start to an adulthood filled with glasses of merlot and reruns of “Mad Men.”
Well… not quite.
Underage drinking isn’t exactly uncommon. Nearly 80 percent of high school seniors admit to having at least tried alcohol.
For some, underage drinking elicits images of destroyed livers, car crashes, and vomiting in a bathroom. For others, parties and excessive drinking are a biweekly event. But it shouldn’t be so black and white.
While some of the statistics we hear are startling, they don’t accurately represent real-world situations that many students are bound to encounter.
For example, we are told that people who begin drinking before the age of 15 are seven times more likely to experience problems with alcohol than those who waited until they were 21. I would argue that this has more to do with genetic predisposition and family values than age.
Switched from 18 to 21 in 1984, the higher age limit is a recent effort to prevent high schoolers from obtaining alcohol. But fake IDs and parents who keep alcohol in the house are enough for most kids to get by.
In Germany, the legal drinking age is 16, but alcohol addiction rates are about the same as in the United States. With a higher drinking age comes curiosity, as if alcohol is something special saved for “grown ups.”
I asked resident German Annabel Epstein about drinking in her country. “It’s a social event – people drink at dinner with their families, so there’s no urge to overdo it like there is here,” she told me.
Think about it: If you drank on a regular basis with your family, in a safe environment, then perhaps it would lose its luster. Drinking wouldn’t be a competition, or a once-in-a-while opportunity, and maybe binge-drinking rates would plummet.
Still, there are important safety concerns that remain widely unaddressed in health classes.
As is usually the case, education is key. But here at South, it’s taken to the extreme. I asked my freshman brother about his recent experience with 9th Grade Wellness. When I asked him what lessons stuck out, he mentioned a guest speaker who told stories of brain damage, death, and even one beheading, all caused by underage drinking.
Four years later, this is something I remember too. The graphic tales certainly made an impression, but have held little relevance in my or my friends’ personal lives.
“There are extreme punishments for kids who get caught drinking and do sports,” he said when I asked what other details stood out. “I know it’s supposed to be a deterrent, but it just seems unfair.”
Schools should ditch the horror stories and focus on simple things like learning recovery position and rotating designated drivers so no one feels tempted to drink and drive. Furthermore, parents should care more about the safety of their kids, rather than whether or not they’ve been drinking.
Teach kids how to know when to stop drinking, instead of trying to intimidate them into never stepping foot into a party. And, if you were wondering, signs of alcohol poisoning include vomiting (duh), seizures (woah), slow or irregular breathing, low body temperature, and passing out.
As long as drinking is part of the world we live in, it will be part of a teenager’s world. An essential part of being a teenager is experimenting with being a grown up.
Why is this topic too taboo for real conversation between parents and children?
I’m certainly not condoning drinking for people who choose not to do it, and no one should feel pressured to do anything they don’t want to. But if you’re consistently embarrassed by last-night-you’s behavior, then that’s a sign to stop.
By no means do I want to trivialize alcoholism, but I do wish that whoever designs the Wellness class for freshmen would recognize the inevitability of underage drinking and teach them how to deal with it rather than to avoid it.
We’re teenagers — if adults tell us not to do something, of course we’re going to do it anyway. And if they know we’re going to do it, they might as well teach us how to do it the right way.
If you were confused about any of the safety precautions or symptoms I mentioned, check out this pamphlet. It should explain most of it.
