Wine With Dinner and Kids

Eric Asimov wrestles with introducing his teenaged children to wine.

(Researchers) concluded that teenagers should be taught to enjoy wine with family meals, and 25 years later Dr. Vaillant stands by his recommendation. “The theoretical position is: driving a car, shooting a rifle, using alcohol are all dangerous activities,” he told me, “and the way you teach responsibility is to let parents teach appropriate use.”

“If you are taught to drink in a ceremonial way with food, then the purpose of alcohol is taste and celebration, not inebriation,” he added. “If you are forbidden to use it until college then you drink to get drunk.”

My children, both under 21, drink wine occasionally at dinner. My theory, like Asimov's, is that regarding wine naturally and seriously demystifies drinking, and makes binge drinking less fascinating.

My sons know quite a bit about wine because knowledge is part of the experience of drinking wine. We talk about wine as we drink it, about its sensory qualities and background. When my wife and I open an interesting bottle we let them have a smell and a taste; neither has ever had a full glass, but both have tried a wide variety of wines from around the world. They know that Pinot Noir is the grape of Burgundy and Cabernet Sauvignon in the grape of Bordeaux and Napa. I believe that the biggest risk of introducing them to wine in moderation at meals is that I will turn them into wine bores.

In Kentucky, where I live, I could go to jail for serving a half glass of wine to my children with Easter dinner. The odds against that are high, but there are absolutists who believe that all drinking is bad, and that anyone who serves any alcohol whatsoever to teenagers is corrupting and abusing them.

I disagree. Asimov disagrees. I'd be interested in your opinion.

Comments

[Frank]

The attitudes in Kentucky about church and drinking are leftovers from the Cane Ridge revival. I can't say that I agree with them, either.

“The theoretical position is: driving a car, shooting a rifle, using alcohol are all dangerous activities,” he told me, “and the way you teach responsibility is to let parents teach appropriate use.”

Now that is an attitude that I whole heartedly approve of. Parents should be the ones to teach their children about most things. However, due to our ever increasing nanny state, government and schools have become the defacto educators for our children on everything from driving to sex ed to alcohol. It used to be that it was expected that a child would already know how to read by the time they entered kindergartn. Now you have Head Start, and in some cases Early Head Start, where children enter school as early as one year old, and the state becomes the primary educator. With every step the state has taken, parents have relinquished that much more of their responsibilities to teach their children right from wrong, as well as basic principles like responsible drinking, driving, and how to not get knocked up at 13.

The next step is to move towards a more totalitarian society, much like Europe, where parents who attempt to pass on their values to their children are prosecuted for not allowing their children to become part of the collective. Their have been numerous stories about parents in Germany being prosecuted for attempting to home school their children, and I can forsee a time in the not too distant future when these same types of prosecutions come to the new world. We've seen the beginning of it with the recent ruling in California that their is no right for parents to home school.

Once rulings like that become commonplace, giving your children a half a glass of wine may be the least of our worries.

[syd]

Wow, you give me the perfect opportunity to make a good Southern Baptist joke, and I'm going to bow out. Because, I think what you're doing with your kids is educational and introduces an aspect of fine culture. Will it prevent future keg stands? I don't know.

[Lee]

You know, that sounds like our family and firearms. Guns never had any allure of the forbidden because they were always around, and dad made sure that we knew how to use them and how to be safe with them.

Because of that, I'm a firm believer that there is no such thing as a gun 'accident.'

I think you're right on the wine as well. And when in college, while the average sophomore is chugging Natty Lite, I'm sure your sons will be wisely using their wine knowledge to impress some lovely coeds.

While avoiding being bores, I'm sure.

[Tom W]

I think there are too many factors behind problem drinking to state whether letting teenagers drink small amounts will encourage or inhibit later misbehavior. I also think wine and beer are food and teaching teenagers to know the difference between good food and crap is important for both health and socialization. So letting your sons learn wine by tasting might not keep them from problems later on (if other factors are there) but it should keep them from pretending that Boones Farm should be considered a wine.

[Pursuit]

Well, I'm the guy who bought my older daughter a shotgun when she turned 13 so that we could shoot trap together. So teaching both girls about wine by encouraging them to imbibe with us at dinner, or during cocktail hour is kind of a no-brainer. So in words that I have never written here, you're absolutely correct.

There is one smallish sort of quibble that I have though. You quote Asimov (by the way his grand dad or father or some sort was Isaac I believe) as saying the following:

“The theoretical position is: driving a car, shooting a rifle, using alcohol are all dangerous activities,” he told me, “and the way you teach responsibility is to let parents teach appropriate use.”

Allow me to remind you, my good sir, that you live in a state where using alcohol while driving a car and shooting out the window is considered by some to be appropriate behavior. So in Kentuck's specific case, some rules, judiciously applied to the right classes, may be quite wise.

[Tom]

Saying that drinking, driving and shooting simultaneously are "appropriate behavior" in Kentucky is incorrect. I really, really wanted to play off your "absolutely correct" thing, but -- alas -- I can't. Simultaneous drinking, driving and shooting are, under current law, required in Kentucky. It's why no one wants to accompany their 9 year olds when they take their driving test.

[Lee]

Hell, I was drinking, driving, and shooting (at road signs) just this past Tuesday.

Good times.

[Squidley]

Tom, I agree with you again. Frank is also absolutely correct; it is primarily parents' responsibility to teach their children, and we relinquish that responsibility to the state at our own peril.

California is rapidly moving towards European-style socialism, which inevitably transmogrifies into leftist totalitarianism. In addition to not being allowed to smoke in any enclosed area, in addition to the right to homeschool being adjudicated out of existence, in addition to some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation, the Nanny State of California has also enacted a foie gras ban. How long until we have European-style bans on free speech? Oh, oops! I forgot--we already have those. They're called "campus speech codes," and they're not limited to the People's Republic.

Can you see why I fear liberalism--which is simply inconsistent leftism--and its attendant totalitarianism far, far more than I fear right-wingers and their urges towards restrictionism? In any case, right-wing restrictions tend to curtail excessive individualism, while leftist restrictions tend to curtail basic freedoms.

Back to teaching kids to drink. How young were your kids when you first let them have alcohol? My brother let his eldest daughter start trying beer at age 2. Now, at four, she can take it or leave it.