Few deny that a drinking age is necessary. We also need a smart phone age. It's quite obvious that many teens are addicted to their phones and the mostly useless content they consume there.
I fail to see how this is anything but blaming the youth (or, modern speech "ageism").
Absolutely, adults do pretty badly on this. They also consume alcohol, and do other stupid shit.
Yet, the kids should be protected from this. This is the parent post's point!
Because in the UK, doing this even just for porn sites creates a slippery slope: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/dec/05/pornography-...
That's only because teetotalers never really went away. Even after the repeal of Prohibition, they still existed and eventually morphed into MADD. In Europe drinking ages are pretty relaxed. France was serving wine to school children.
So yeh, I deny it. And that I'm alone in doing it has more to do with ovine tendencies of humanity, than anyone actually giving it much actual thought.
You must have lived in a different german reality then.
For us it was always easy to get someone else to buy your booze, if it was not already given to you somehow by the older guys. Or if you looked slightly older(I was NEVER asked for ID while buying drinks). Many people in my age group developed a drinking habit - and big surprise, quite some of them turned into alcoholics later. Also no surprise, with so many adult role models being drinkers as well.
The general principle of gradually allowing more, might help a tiny little bit preventing early access for some people, but it absolutely did not help prevent alcohol abuse. There is just a general culture of alcohol abuse (Oktoberfest and co). So yeah, we had also fun, but I strongly reject the idea, that alcohol could help preventing smartphone addicts or is somehow better. Rather the contrary as teens still drink today and can just get addicted to both.
If it weren’t so problematic for other reasons being drunk all the time might stop smartphone addiction.
Plus, it's not like kids follow the drinking laws if they don't want to
You are absolutely correct that German teens have much easier access to hard liquor the American terns. I presume this is some combination of the culture and enforcement realities in Germany compared to the US.
However, I would also (anecdotally) say that the teen culture in Germany around drinking is healthier and less prone to binging than in America. That doesn't mean there aren't problems, but they seemed less frequent and more muted.
My personal hypothesis is that this is because that 16 year limit and the difference in culture meant that teens ate far more likely to drink with and around their family. This facilitates intergenerational knowledge transfer about responsible alcohol usage and reduces risks.
There are huge local differences. In my youth and hometown, it was definitely binge drinking - and we just followed tradition. But what I learned of other areas, was actually quite similar. Healthy alcohol consumption was rather the exception, but there is a trend towards it.
And I have not been to the US to directly compare, but I cannot really say that I experienced "intergenerational knowledge transfer about responsible alcohol usage" in germany. That is, my father does not drink, because my grandfather drank too much. Does this count? Otherwise I just know too many families with at least one alcoholic and some on the way. And teenage drinking is just something teens are expected to do and the parents just try to limit the extremes. But many would be actually worried if their children never drank, because it might mean, they are isolated oddballs.
I'm not saying that alcoholism isn't an issue in Germany. However the data I've found says alcoholism is about twice as prevelant in the USA as in Germany. Healthiness of drinking behavior isn't all all or nothing thing but a spectrum.
Having a sober father may have meant that you missed out on more direct knowledge transfere from your parents. You still would have had some of that knowledge transfere indirectly via your peers
In the USA, due to the laws, underage drinking, especially in highschool, tends to be much more segregated in terms of age. Each generation of teenages has to learn how to drink while hiding it from their parents. In my experience this means that teenage drinkers in germany tend to be more aware of their level of inebriation and thus tend to not binge as hard. There is more of an expectation socially to keep your shit together while in the USA there's more of a tendency to celebrate and brag about losing control, especially among the young for whom it is more novel. It's also possible (indeed likely) that many of the Germans kids I knew started drinking before 16 and that accounts for some of the differences I observed.
I was at a gymnasium as well ... and we were drinking with the teachers on occasions.
"However the data I've found says alcoholism is about twice as prevelant in the USA as in Germany. Healthiness of drinking behavior isn't all all or nothing thing but a spectrum."
It is of course possible, that you have it even worse. But my point was that I cannot confirm, that we have a healthy drinking culture in germany. We do have a drinking culture and some of it may prevent some escapades, but all in all I do not think it is healthy as indeeds promotes regular drinking as something normal.
"It's also possible (indeed likely) that many of the Germans kids I knew started drinking before 16 and that accounts for some of the differences I observed."
Very likely. We started with beer with 12 ... and the first time totally drunk was with 14.
"tendency to celebrate and brag about losing control, especially among the young for whom it is more novel"
And this was (and still is) totally a thing as well.
Anyway, I don't think America should emulate European drinking laws until it can be shown that Europeans drink less than Americans. The average German drinks 13.4 liters of pure alcohol a year, vs 9.8 liters for Americans (still too high): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_c...
With distilled spirits, and especially cocktails, it’s not at all hard to get dangerously drunk without intending to, so it’s a lot riskier.
I'm not super familiar, but my impression is Germany also handled early 90s-ish hackers better than the US did. Just comparing the CCC in Germany to stuff like Operation Sundevil.
I don't even drink, but alcohol after college has been nothing but trouble.
Of course trying to drink away your depression doesn’t work, but alcohol can be a tool in a mentally healthy lifestyle.
> I don't think we should have the state banning all of these things.
The issue here on your part is one of understanding hard power versus soft power. Looking at TV from a holistic perspective, the state has banned a lot of what we'd consider harmful behavior. Over the air programming is relatively tame, and content we consider harmful is more gated and behind paywalls.
For the average video game the condition is the same. You have Sony and Microsoft gating the consoles. You have steam gating much of the PC world, and outside of that you have the credit card companies gating making money of more controversial items.
An area we have the opposite problem is the one of junk food. This entire just self regulate while companies reap record profits selling you purposefully addictive food is working out "fucking great"... for the companies that is, of course for the ever increasing burden of obesity on the country, things aren't going so well.
I'm not opposed to all regulations. I just don't believe we should have the state deciding when people can or can't use a computer, which is what a smartphone really is. It's up to parents to decide up to a certain age, and after that people have autonomy and can make their own decisions.
Because of drunk driving. If that was not an issue, we certainly wouldn't have a drinking age of 21 in the US. Several states still allow your family to serve their children alcohol, which is closer to the example of letting your kid use the internet.
The restriction was because of concerns around minors being too young and naïve to fully understand the full implications of their actions. Which is why consumption is/was allowed at home on the basis that responsible adults will help children to learn to handle alcohol sensibly while stopping them doing anything too stupid ... at least that's the theory anyway.
Similar rules apply to driving, voting, smoking etc in most places. And as it is possible to live a perfectly meaningful life without being bombarded by TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube etc, it's really hard to understand why similar should not apply to Social Media.