A law making it legal to give five-year-old children alcohol at home should be scrapped, according to a leading health education lecturer.
Psychologist Dr Aric Sigman is encouraging doctors to lobby the government to raise the age limit as he said that delaying the time when children and young people take their first sip may stave off future problems.
Writing in the BMJ journal Archives of Disease Childhood, he argued that alcohol is particularly problematic for young people.
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Globally, it remains the leading risk factor for premature death and disability among 15 to 49-year-olds and is a causal factor in more than 200 disease and injury conditions, including “staggering increases in liver disease mortality over the last 40 years, especially in the UK”, he pointed out.
He also said that doctors need to do more to educate parents about the potential harm of early exposure to alcohol and dispel the French family myth that childhood drinking encourages responsible alcohol use later on.
Figures cited from the World Health Organization show that individual alcohol consumption in France and years of life lost are higher – and alcohol’s contribution to the overall death rate is 26 percent higher – than in the UK.
This has prompted the French authorities to raise the legal drinking age and ‘denormalise’ drinking to curb the toll of alcohol on the nation’s health.
Dr Sigman said preliminary research has shown that introducing children to alcohol may recircuit their brain and induce neuroadaptations in regions that influence reward and addiction.
Teen drinking may also lead to changes in gene expression that could influence drinking behaviour in adulthood. He added: “A more visible position by the paediatric profession is required which wrests ownership from that of alcohol initiation being a cultural issue to being a formal medical issue presided over by paediatric medicine – not the national culture.”
Like with tobacco, he said doctors can educate parents on role modelling. Children who see their parents smoking or drinking are more likely to try it themselves which, Dr Sigman said, includes using alcohol to self-medicate.
He said doctors can also highlight the normalising influence of the alcohol industry on school teaching materials, including lesson plans, fact sheets, and films, through charities, youth education projects and education trusts. And they can lobby the government to raise the at-home drinking age from five.
He said: "We should do this not to criminalise parents, but as a signal to reset the alcohol cultural landscape through formal gesture”.
This could also be accompanied by the inclusion of mandatory warnings on all alcohol products and health promotion materials, stating that delaying the drinking age may reduce children’s lifetime risk of alcohol use disorders. He said: “It is time we join the dots and take a far broader and more long-term approach to prevent and reduce future alcohol-related morbidity and mortality.
“The paediatric profession has the respect and the authority to tell society not what it is interested in hearing, but what is in its children’s best interests.”
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