Reducing Underage Drinking A Collective Responsibility (2004) / Chapter Skim
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13 Drinking and Coming of Age in a Cross-Cultural Perspective--Robin Room
13 Drinking and Coming of Age in a Cross-Cultural Perspective--Robin Room
Pages 654-677
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From page 654... ...
But parents, teachers, and other adult guardians define the central task of the child and particularly of the teenager as preparing through education and otherwise to take a full place in adult life, and are concerned about anything that might impede this preparation and about behaviors that may stain future status or injure future functioning in adult life. In this cultural context, there is particular concern about behaviors and experi 654
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From page 655... ...
But the modern legal restrictions both express and encourage a cultural tendency to think of these status differentiations in a particular way: in terms of chronological age. In a strongly universalistic cultural and legal frame, a fixed chronological age applying to everyone is a legal definition of adulthood that is more comfortable and more easily defended than any criterion based on an individualized assessment of maturity or on a civil status (e.g., marriage)
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From page 656... ...
The content of emancipation includes the various behaviors for which there are minimum age requirements, as well as such aspects as staying out late at night and moving out of the parental home. By "settling down" we mean the culturally normative process of taking on an accumulation of continuing obligations: a car loan, a "real" (nontemporary)
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From page 657... ...
For all behaviors except having a full-time job, driving a car alone, and going on a date, some respondents volunteered that it was "never OK," with rates below 10 percent for buying a lottery ticket, drinking beer or liquor, and buying beer, and above 40 percent for getting drunk on beer at home, being a regular smoker, and trying marijuana. Table 13-1 TABLE 13-1 Mean and Standard Deviation of the Acceptable Age for 15 Contested Behaviors, According to Ontario Adults Aged 25 or Older, 1996 Standard Behavior Mean Deviation Go out on a date 16.2 1.4 Buy a lottery ticket 17.4 2.3 Drive a car by himself/herself 17.7*
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From page 658... ...
For the two alcohol items, for example, the average difference between eleventh graders and the adults ages 40 to 54, roughly their parents' generation, is about 21/2 years. The alcohol normative ages given by Ontario adults correspond fairly well to the legal minimum age for purchasing or drinking alcohol in Ontario, which is 19.
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From page 659... ...
659 b b b for grade 55+ 18.3 20.4 19.0 19.6 17.8 19.2 18.5 19.3 34-113 between Thus, and a b b test. eleventh Ontario 40-54 18.2 18.5 18.9 19.7 18.2 18.6 18.8 19.6 70-172 and students nth ni (1997 comparison a b b grade Group 25-39 18.1 18.8 19.0 19.8 17.6 18.5 18.6 19.2 102-210 between Scheffe School Age and a a a in the thirteenth Adult 18-24 17.4 18.5 18.2 18.7 17.9 18.1 18.3 19.0 49-83 on and students Grade based seventh by (2.4)
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From page 660... ...
Although, as has been remarked, "some have viewed the entire period of adolescence in modern cultures as analogous to the disorienting middle stage of van Gennep's classic three-part scheme" of a rite of passage, that is, as "an extended period of transition characterized by uncertainty and confusion that eventually leads to the adult taking his or
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From page 661... ...
Convention on the Rights of the Child, apparently in part over the minimum ages specified for enlisting in military service and for capital punishment. The age at which a person can be tried for a crime as an adult, rather than as a juvenile, is lower in many U.S.
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From page 662... ...
Minimum age specified for alcohol is the age at which some form of alcoholic beverage can be purchased for on-premise or off-premise consumption. Fractional minimum ages for U.S.
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From page 663... ...
The combined effects of these differences in drinking patterns and in cultural norms of drunken comportment can be quite dramatic: Time-series analyses of the relation between changes in average alcohol consumption and changes in homicide rates suggest that an extra unit of drinking pushes the homicide rate up twice as much in northern European countries such as Sweden as in southern European countries such as Portugal (Rossow, 2001)
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From page 664... ...
. Hazardous drinking score: Rehm et al.
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From page 665... ...
DRINKING AND COMING OF AGE 665 Minimum Drinking Age Has Been Has Been (Any Beverage Drunk by Drunk in A/B and Form)
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From page 666... ...
This raises the question whether there is simply an upward shift in the hazardous drinking scale for young adults' drinking in different cultures, with the cultures maintaining their relative positions, or whether cultural differences in the extent of hazardous drinking are muted or overridden by drinking patterns in a common youth culture. The ethnographic literature has traditionally held to the former position: It has been common to argue, in an American context, that American drinking customs would be improved if children were taught to drink with diluted wine at the family dinner table, as traditionally done in France or Italy (Heath, 1995, p.
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From page 667... ...
One of their informants noted that "you have to drink, to show incredible powers of endurance to alcohol." But the attachment of the parties to an occasion that extends back in history, and features of the parties such as traditional drinking games, suggest that the parties do not constitute a new cultural innovation. The somewhat puzzling findings concerning attitudes and norms on drinking among adults in northern and southern Europe (Room and Bullock, 2002)
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From page 668... ...
Trends and Concerns About Teenage Drinking in Europe The ESPAD study also offers the broadest set of quantitative data on changes in teenage drinking in Europe, because the questions asked in 1999 in many of the countries involved also had been asked in an earlier survey in 1995. The general trend from 1995 to 1999 in many countries was for an increase in the proportion of 15- to 16-year-olds reporting drinking 5+ drinks on 3 or more occasions in the past 30 days (Hibell et al., 2000:71)
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From page 669... ...
In fact, concerns about youth drinking have been the main vehicle for expressing concerns about alcohol problems in general at a continental level, such as in the European Union. A flurry of concern about "alcopops" (sweetened alcoholic drinks perceived to be aimed at youth)
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From page 670... ...
One potential consideration in discussions about the minimum legal age for drinking would be the effect of alcohol on the physically developing body. This was a consideration in the recent proposal by a Canadian Senate committee for a minimum age of 16 for a legalized marijuana regime (Senate Special Committee, on Illegal Drugs 2002, pp.
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From page 671... ...
A position paper of the National Youth Rights Association (n.d.) summarizes the main line of argument on this issue that has been used in the United States: "Drinking age laws discourage rather than encourage a transition period between youthful abstinence and adult use of alcoholic beverages," writes journalist and sociologist Mike A
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From page 672... ...
A Danish study has recently found that instituting a minimum age of 15 for purchases for off-premise consumption had an effect on consumption levels (Møller, 2002)
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From page 673... ...
Institutionalized patterned evasion was the traditional approach of American colleges to underage drinking before the last two decades. A third choice is a "harm reduction" strategy, which involves acknowledging the reality of youthful drinking in the course of making provision to reduce the harms associated with it.
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From page 674... ...
Nor is it likely that state actions can succeed in cutting off all drinking below the age of 21. In these circumstances, there is a need to look not only at means of prevention of underage drinking, but also at means of handling it to minimize the adverse consequences.
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From page 675... ...
Rockville, MD: National Institute on Drug Abuse and Alcoholism. National Youth Rights Association.
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From page 676... ...
Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, Canadian Senate.
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From page 677... ...
. Trends in alcohol consumption and drinking patterns: Sociological and economic explanations and alcohol policies.
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