You are not allowed to buy alcohol in the pub or shop if you are not yet eighteen. However, most young people try it out before that time. For example, 21 percent of twelve-year-olds ever drank alcohol, according to figures from the Netherlands Youth Institute from 2019.
Young people usually drink more than one glass
By the age of sixteen, almost 72 percent have already tapped down a glass at some point. A quarter of parents sometimes offer their underage child alcohol. That may sound harmless. But when young people really start drinking, it usually doesn’t stop at one glass.
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Just look at the numbers: 42 percent of 16-year-olds drank five glasses of alcohol or more in one day at least once in the last month. That’s quite something. If an adult man swallows this amount on one occasion, we call it binge drinking.
‘Bingen’ can, among other things, saddle you with kidney failure, heart failure, damage to your esophagus and stomach or alcohol poisoning. For women, this even applies from four glasses.
Alcohol shrinks your brain volume
Let’s face it: alcohol isn’t good for anyone. Scientists from the University of Pennsylvania (US) saw in a study in 2022 that a few glasses of alcohol per week already causes a smaller brain volume in adults. According to the researchers, such a smaller brain can be compared to the aging of your brain by two years.
That is not good news for adults, but certainly not for a developing child’s brain. What does alcohol do to their brains? And why is the substance so problematic for young people?
Your brain develops into your twenties
Your brain develops and matures until you are at least twenty years old. They consist of gray and white matter. The gray matter are the cell bodies of your brain cells. The white matter is the connection between all those cells. As your brain matures, the amount of gray matter decreases. It is replaced by white matter. The volume of the gray matter decreases, but the number of connections between the brain cells increases.
‘This ensures, among other things, faster communication between different parts of the brain, so that you can perform tasks faster and more efficiently’, explains Ingmar Franken. He is professor of clinical psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam and studies addiction and the brain.
Adolescent brain matures from back to front
Your brain matures very slowly from back to front from about age 12. Not every part of your brain matures at the same rate. This is the case with all adolescent brains and is normal. But the reward system develops before the control system.
As an adolescent you do have a reward system that makes you hungry for beer or a mixed drink. But you don’t have a good brake yet that tells you that a drinking session with alcohol does not combine well with appearing fresh and fruity at your side job the next day. This means that you do unwise things during puberty, such as drinking a lot.
Is drinking alcohol more harmful for teenagers?
But is drinking more harmful to teens than to adults? It is not easy to see what alcohol does to the adolescent brain. You would then have to feed a group of teenagers alcohol and not a comparable group of teenagers. That’s quite unethical. Yet there is research by Franken that comes close. This shows that alcohol disrupts the maturation of the brain. The gray matter decreases faster and the white matter increases more slowly.
But how big are the consequences of that disruption? Is it still okay with an alcoholic adolescent brain? You read that in Psychology Quest 5, 2022.
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