Today’s question is: when is the right time to give your child alcohol to drink.
It’s a bit early in the morning. You can see that the moon is still up.
It’s just after half-six, and it’s a nice morning.
A bit warm but it’s nice.
So when’s the right time to give your child alcohol to drink?
Never! Never!
I can only go from my own personal experience and I think I probably gave my son his first sip of beer when he was maybe 13 or 14.
Maybe younger than that, I don’t remember.
It’s funny to do it.
It’s sort of ‘look at his face! Look how he doesn’t like that!’, but at the same time he knows that daddy and mommy drink the beer, and they like it.
And just because you don’t like it now, it’s something that the grownups like.
It’s something they like to do.
So, that decision to give my son his first drink of beer came from ignorance, not being educated enough.
I don’t mean educated in university sense, I mean educated in the common sense, educated enough to know that what you’re doing is feeding your child a drug.
You’re teaching him or her to accept this drug into their lives as part of the growing up process.
You don’t think you’re doing it but that’s exactly what you are doing.
Like I say, I’ve gone through this over and over in my own mind and thought to myself, if I could do this again, what would I do?
I’m not doing this from the perspective of thinking I can do it again, or in terms of regret.
I’m thinking about it in terms of how I can use this within alcohol mastery to try and teach people who are coming after me.
I was 24 when Shawn was born.
I think I just turned 25.
But I was young.
I was barely able to drink myself.
I didn’t think about stuff like that.
It was a normal thing for me to do to sort of…not feed him on alcohol per se, but you don’t leave a can of beer out and go ‘here’s a glass of beer for dinner’.
It was like ‘have a little sip. There’s nothing wrong with it’, that kind of thing.
I remember we were joking around one time with one of my sisters.
The girls and I stuck a dummy into the top of the beer, just into the head of the beer and I put it into her mouth.
And the way she was sucking on it, and we were bossing her and she was laughing.
But looking back on it now, it’s like a horror show, Jesus. What are you doing?
If I had a child now.
If I could go back to when I was younger and when Shawn was younger, I’d be focusing purely on trying to teach him the best possible way to get through life, to pursue his life, nutrition.
I’d be teaching him that alcohol, cigarettes are drugs just like anything else.
I understand the excuses that people give.
They say ‘I don this because I want to give my child the best possible start in life. And if I introduce them in alcohol in the safety of my own home, in the safety of our surrounding parentage, and the families around, it’s safe. Once they get into the outside world, it won’t lead to addiction or abuse’.
There’s been enough studies to show that that’s bullshit.
The younger you bring a child into the fold of your own drug abuse, drug use, the more normalised it becomes in their heads.
I think about it and it doesn’t make any sense the other way around.
You’re attributing something to the child’s life, you’re normalising it as part of the normal process in your own life by showing it to them as a normal part of the process.
When you give the child for the first time, it is actually giving him permission to do it. You can say they’re not allowed until they’re 18.
But they can get into serious trouble for this as well.
I think in England, I read a bizarre law in the UK where you can give your child alcohol once he’s over 4 years.
I’m not sure where I found that, but it’s a long time since I read it, but I’m sure it’s still the case in England.
That once you’re in the privacy of your own home, you can.
It’s ridiculous.
You’ve got that misconception in the beginning that bringing alcohol into your child’s life at an early age would make them less likely to get addicted to the stuff when they’re older.
Why would you do this with cigarettes then?
They’re the same sort of thing in our society.
‘Have a puff on this cigarette’.
I think my dad said when his father caught him smoking, he locked him in a cupboard and made him smoke a whole box of cigars until he was green in the gills and was puking.
That didn’t stop him from smoking.
My dad was a 60-a-day chain smoker for the first 50 years of his life.
He stopped smoking when he was 55 or so, and even at that, he’d have the odd cigar.
The cigar thing was in his head.
That didn’t work, and it doesn’t work for anyone.
There are a lot of illegal drugs out there that a child and get their hands on…or a young adult, I should say.
I had my first joint when I was 15.
I’ve tried a lot of drugs mostly when I was younger.
So, if that’s the logic, if the logic is introduce the drug early in life, and it will teach the child to cope and to be able to handle this stuff, it’s bullshit.
The WHO has come out and they’ve done may studies and they said that the earlier a child starts drinking or tastes alcohol, the more likely they are to have alcohol related injuries when they get older, and alcohol dependence.
And going back to this dependence thing, dependence is if you need alcohol for specific things.
It’s like if you can’t go a weekend without drinking, if you can’t go out on a Saturday night without drinking, then you’re dependent regardless of how much you actually drink.
If you drink 2 or 3 on a Saturday evening, then you’re dependent on the stuff.
So, it’s a myth that early drinkers have more responsible attitude towards alcohol, they don’t.
It’s been proven time and time again.
It’s a bad message to be giving to our children.
This bullshit message that alcohol is somehow an acceptable thing in our society whereas all the other drugs like marijuana, cocaine and heroin aren’t.
Most of these other drugs are less damaging than alcohol, and yet we all the time have this bullshit notion that there is health giving properties in alcohol.
It is something we jump on because we want to believe it, because it’s acceptable in our society.
As soon as someone says in the media that if you drink moderately, it’s good for your heart and long term health.
You’ll live longer than an abstainer.
I’ve done a previous video from a doctor that just disproved the whole thing.
He said these things were forged.
They left out so many people from the study, and they would bring in a lot of long term total alcoholics, people who were told they had cirrhosis of the liver and had to quit drinking…they just forged the whole statistics.
They say if you drink moderately and no one can agree on moderate, then it’s proven that you will have health benefits.
We’ve got that on one side and other stuff on the other side; people saying all these other drugs are dangerous for you and are unhealthy for you, and yet when you look at the statistics, 3 1/2 million people die every year form drinking alcohol.
And when you take all the other drugs put together, excluding the cigarettes (5 million people die every year from cigarettes), that’s only a quarter of a million.
So 14 times the amount of people die from drinking alcohol as asking al the other drugs combined.
200 different health conditions are caused by alcohol and seeing as we’re talking about young people and encouraging them to drink in the mythical belief that if we get them to drink in a healthy, safe way, then they will have a healthy attitude towards them.
25% of all young deaths between 20 and 39 are alcohol related.
That is fucking staggering.
So, if you’re considering giving your child a drink of alcohol when they’re in the house and thinking it’s safe, don’t do it.
If you’re considering drinking in front of them, don’t do it.
Even by drinking, you’re making this an acceptable part of life to them. You’re making this out to be normal.
This is a drug that kills 3.5 million people every year. That’s the whole population of alcohol gone in one fell sweep every year.
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Until next time, stay safe, keep the kids safe. Keep the alcohol out of your mouth and their mouth.
DON’T LET YESTERDAY TAKE UP TOO MUCH OF TODAY
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
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