Parents should allow their adolescent children to have a supervised drink at home because thrill-seeking teenagers will seek it out anyway, British anthropologist Anne Fox said yesterday.
Ms Fox, who is an adviser on drinking issues to the British army and British government, was addressing a seminar organised by Meas, the drinks industry association set up to promote responsible drinking.
Her comments are likely to anger some anti-alcohol campaigners who have discouraged parents from facilitating underage drinking.
Asked if parents should let their 15 or 16-year-olds have a drink at home, Ms Fox said: "It's very, very controversial. I actually think that they should, yes, but the parents need a lot of education in order to be able to do that safely."
Some parents would not let children have a beer yet they allowed alcopops, which contained the same percentage of alcohol, she said.
"It's certainly proven that young people that grow up with alcohol as a non-magical, normalised part of life are much less prone to using alcohol in a destructive, binge-drinking rebellious way."
She went to school in France and said her school provided jugs of wine during meal times on certain occasions. However, they were mostly left untouched by teenagers who were more interested in going to cafés to flout the ban on coffee.
Ms Fox said the "shock horror" approach aimed at stopping alcohol abuse among young people did not work and was counterproductive. Teenagers liked risk, so the more risky a substance appeared, the more likely they were to try it, she said.
She said the campaigns could do damage as people might accept the message initially but then reject it when their own experiences did not tally with the shock scenarios.
She referred to one talk given by a teacher who told students that binge-drinking might encourage them to fling dustbins through shop windows. This led to a spate of bin-throwing incidents.
"So if you tell people how alcohol is going to make them behave . . . that leads to the actual behaviour," she said.
Ms Fox said current alcohol education campaigns "simply don't work" and should be dramatically changed.
In her work with teenagers, she has focused on the damage alcohol does to the brain, which only stops developing around the age of 20-25.
"Once they understand what their brain does and how important it is and they start to develop that respect for their brain and then they realise what damage they are actually doing, they do tend to seek to modify their own behaviour."
