[Ditter]

My beautiful smart 30 year old niece entered rehab for alcohol abuse yesterday. I hope 6 weeks is enough. Her parents always let her drink when she was a kid and when they divorced when she was 18, she already knew how to make it better.

[Eric Blair 2084]

Apparently your niece racks disiprin.

[Thrownatbirth]

Be happy that she's on her way to a new life, and at such a relatively young age.

That'll preclude a lot of damage.

[Mr. Silverback]

This stuff is not hard and fast. My parents forbid alcohol in the strongest terms, though they were not teetotalers. I’ll admit I drank underage but I was for the most part a very, very responsible drinker until I stopped completely in 1994.

I know parents who took that same approach, and their kids were major binge drinkers. That includes my brother, who nearly killed himself driving drunk. Yet I know families that handled it with supervised drinking and did well (minor league social drinkers) or did poorly...I have a high school friend who goes through wine like Bacchus.

The bottom line is it’s very unlikely that your niece’s parents caused her alcoholism, any more than my parents caused both binge drinking and teetotalling in their boys with the exact same approach to alcohol. Mainly I think it was the fact that my brothers and i ran with very different crowds.