Britain’s teenagers are the ‘new puritans’

LONDON— When Xenia Clegg Littler and her friends were underage, their idea of fun was shopping, walking in parks and eating ice cream, not doing shots or chugging beer. She never had a drink until she was 18, the legal age in Britain and now, at 19, she has as little interest in alcohol as ever.

“I’d rather wake up in the morning and get on with my day and achieve what I want to achieve than wake up with a massive hangover,” said Clegg Littler, an actress from West London. “I need to have control over where I am, and what I do.”

Teenage and young adult drinking has fallen drastically in recent years all across Europe, and nowhere as much as in Britain. In less than a generation, British teenagers have gone from being among the biggest underage imbibers anywhere in Europe to being about average.

There are competing ideas about what is driving the trend, but it has been documented in multiple studies, including one released in late September, based on surveys conducted every four years for the World Health Organization in more than 30 countries. In 2002, according to the WHO study, about 26 per cent of European 15-year-olds drank alcohol at least once a week, but by 2014, that had dropped to 13 per cent. The surveys measured England, Scotland and Wales separately, but their results were similar; taken together, the share of 15-yearolds who were regular drinkers there fell from about 46 per cent to about 10 per cent. A report from the University of Sheffield, based on a different set of surveys and also released recently, found similarly striking results among minors and young adults in England. In 2002, 25 per cent of people ages 8-12 said they had tried alcohol, but in 2016, just 4 per cent had. In 2001, it found, only 12 per cent of English 16- and 17-year-olds considered themselves non-drinkers; in 2016, it was up to 35 per cent.

“The scale of change is such that some news outlets have labelled today’s youth as ‘the new puritans’ and ‘generation sensible,’ ” the Sheffield report said.

Binge drinking and drunkenness by young people have also declined, in Britain and across Europe, but not as steeply as regular or occasional drinking. The theories about why young Britons drink less than their predecessors are intriguing but unproven, said James Nicholls, the director of research and policy development at Alcohol Research UK, a non-profit group. But he suggested that the spread of social media is one factor.

“Alcohol doesn’t play as important a role in socializing as it did in the past,” Nicholls said. “Young people can now have an active social life without leaving their house.”

Social media has made users more image-conscious, he noted, while also providing lasting documentation, in text and images, of behaviour people might prefer to forget.

“There’s a trend of greater sense of health consciousness among young people,” Nicholls added.