Forbidden Fruit
The Chief Medical Officer, Dr Liam Donaldson, is to announce today that guidelines allowing children from the age of 5 to 15 to drink alcohol in the home, and under parental supervision, are wrong. His position will be that the years up to the age of 15 should be totally alcohol free, and the government will issue new guidelines based on this.
This is tosh for several reasons . We have known for many years that the French approach, in which alcohol is introduced gradually by parents, by means of watered down wine, is much more effective in training children to have a sensible approach as they grow into adulthood. How will Donaldson’s approach enable children to handle the inevitable peer pressure to drink outside the home? My belief is that it will make it all the more attractive for them to do so.
And how is it to be enforced? Will squads of parental supervision police batter down front doors at mealtimes to haul in offenders?
Of course, parental supervision is not an absolute concept, and it ranges in quality from superb to almost non-existent. But the top and bottom of all this is that it will be yet another excuse for the government to control us. Big Brother is absolutely relentless.