Word: alcoholism
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...period since the city's social-host law was first enacted has also seen an enormous increase in the number of kids going to hospitals with alcohol-related problems. According to data from San Diego County's health department, the number of minors presenting alcohol and substance-abuse problems at health-care facilities in the jurisdiction rose from 473 in 2002 to 892 last year. At one of the city's biggest hospitals, Sharp Memorial, 7.3% of underage trauma admissions involved alcohol in 2002; by 2005 the figure...
When I mentioned some of the arguments against social-host laws at the San Diego County Alcohol-Policy Panel, DiCiccio offered another reason that kids shouldn't drink with adults: alcohol could hurt their developing brains...
...accepted as an article of faith in the prevention community that "the teen brain" should not be exposed to any alcohol. But the research on alcohol and the young brain is actually quite murky. It has mainly shown that very high doses of alcohol given to adolescent rats (those roughly 40 days old) affect those animals differently from the way alcohol affects adult rats. In typical studies, the rats are injected with 5 g of alcohol per 1,000 g of their body weight, often after the rodents have been deprived of food for 12 hours. Rats metabolize alcohol about...
What these rat studies tell us is that exposure to very large amounts of alcohol (particularly repeated exposure) probably inhibits normal brain development. And yet there are signs that in certain ways the adolescent brain is better equipped to handle alcohol than the adult brain. Adolescent rats show less vulnerability than adult rats to alcohol's sedating effects (which is one reason kids can party so much longer than adults). Other studies have found that, as White writes, "adolescents may be less sensitive than adults to the effects of alcohol on motor coordination." None of this means you should...
...Because alcohol is harder to obtain now than in the '70s and '80s, more kids are delaying their first drink. But most people will drink before 21, and it's a reasonable goal for parents to be there when it happens. "What if a kid has never had alcohol and drinks for the first time at 21?" asks Peele, the author of Addiction-Proof Your Child. "If they haven't developed a capacity to regulate themselves with alcohol at all, you can be headed for trouble...