If there is one part of the world where liberal drinking age laws and attitudes are shaped to a large extent by culture , fostering responsible drinking styles and behavior among the youth, it is Europe.

Notwithstanding available statistics that moderate-to-excessive drinking has led to a 20 percent increase in hospital admissions over the last few years, in countries like England, underage drinking is not at all regarded as a social taboo.

In Italy, most parents who have expressed their sentiments (in online forum or actual conversations) about other nations’ relatively extreme policy measures on youth’s allowable drinking age opine that it is through education, not revising laws to raise the legal drinking age, that will discourage irresponsible accident-related drinking. The legal drinking age in Italy precedes the biological age when youngsters officially become adults. At 16, most individuals have imbibed the culture and language of wine. Because Italy’s youth learn to sip wine during family mealtimes and are taught early on to discern the subtle tastes as well as dangers of alcohol, issues like imposing sterner policies on the legal drinking age in Italy or other countries in Europe for that matter do not fly. For most parents, withholding alcohol consumption until the young ones reach 21 merely whets the appetite for something that is forbidden and possibly dangerous – like drunk & reckless driving.

With the relatively young legal drinking age in Italy, and with drinking patterns closely interwoven with culture and within the context of family, most parents assume an assured stance that their kids will not likely get into scrapes connected with alcohol misuse. While the Italian Health Ministry may present figures showing that one out of five teenaged kids admit to being regularly inebriated, it does not quite correlate with accidents.

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