This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi, this is Annie Grace and I am answering readers questions on the other of this naked mind.

And today I have a question from a woman who wants to be anonymous, we're going to call her P.

So she says, I'm looking for more information about the relationship of alcohol at a young age and future drinking.

My sister's husband is from England and they let my 15 year old niece have a little wine with dinner.

And I feel that by teaching kids at a young age, they feel that by teaching kids at a young age, about drinking responsibly, they will be much better able to handle it.

My sister and her husband both drink way too much, by the way, and I hear this all the time.

Clearly, I know it's BS, but I would love some studies and facts to back me up.

First of all, this is such a sensitive topic. I know that if somebody came into my life and started telling me how to parent my kids or what to think about parenting my kids, it would be very easy to throw up walls.

I think that us looking at this from a place of, I'm just going to send some studies and then hopefully they, you know, get the message or something might have the opposite effect.

So I would first caution you about how to approach this. I've thought about sort of how to approach this. And I think that the best way to approach anything like this is to be present and a really good influence yourself.

And then hopefully somebody will come toward you asking for information. So the thing about humans is we tend to talk to people we trust and who accept us like as is no matter what.

And then those people are the people we tend to ask for advice. So generally, if you want to give advice becoming the person who is accepting and is going to be trusting.

And I know that's hard and it's counterintuitive, especially when you disapprove of something your brother is doing.

So if you got really close to your brother and you know, we're really kind of as go to person about his daughter and he started asking like, I don't know why she's so irritable.

And you started to say, well, I heard this stuff about maybe it's alcohol. That would be totally different than like forwarding a bunch of studies.

So I have no idea what your intention is with this information, but I did want to clarify that because it is such a sensitive thing.

And mainly I want to clarify it because sometimes if we come in with this sledgehammer and I'm speaking from experience, I did this to far too many of my friends when I first stopped drinking I came in with a sledgehammer and said, Hey, guess what?

How causes cancer? Oh my gosh, guess what we're doing on this bad stuff to our kids. Guess what? And like the door was slammed really quickly. And I think it actually took longer for my friends to kind of want to have a conversation about this.

And it would have if I wouldn't have come in with this sledgehammer. So off my soapbox for that. And let's just definitely get to the question. So there are studies that show very definitively that alcohol given to kids, especially by parents at a young age, those children have problems, more problems with alcohol growing up.

So that's a definite correlation. So if you think that giving your children alcohol is going to teach them responsibility is going to give them, you know, like up on things because they'll know how to moderate it, they'll know how to handle it.

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