If you are pregnant here in the US they tell you from day 1: not a drop of alcohol. But how come my girlfriends in Italy never gave up drinking during their pregnancy?Talking to my OB doctor he explained that the majority of people in the US drink for getting drunk, so the women, and it's easier and safe to tell them not to drink at all and avoid the whole "quantity" problem (which is hard to manage). Right, my girlfriends never drank for getting drunk...
U.S. policy on alcohol is, for what is my culture, a left-over off prohibitionism.
The drinking age here it is 21, since 1984 and is one of the highest in the world. Though, the effort to stamp out alcohol use has failed, creating a culture in which kids just binge in secret and this is pretty dangerous. Today's news stories are high school parties that end in gruesome wrecks and college kids killing themselves by consuming, say, 100 shots as a contest.
Parents I think have help to create this: officially most say they oppose any drinking by those under 21 but unofficially many also seem to just think that "kids will be kids", just like they were not so long ago and few of them let their kids having big drunken parties at home.
I grew up in a place that, just like France, consider alcohol like part of regular quotidian family life. Definitely not this big deal. I never liked wine but if I would my parents wouldn't have seen any problem to let me drink along with them during family dinner and let me taste different kinds of wine, beer, liquors.
I know this may sound a little nutty to the average American but I really would suggest to drink with your kids before they go binge-drinking with someone else... I mean, that's a mostly European approach to alcohol and I really don't see any reason why it wouldn't work here.
