Professor Bobby Smyth

And your explanation for that is not that you want to control their life or make their life miserable.

It's that you want to keep them healthy.

So to be explicit on that, one of those that perhaps parents struggle with most, perhaps in Ireland, is the idea of drinking and not drinking till 18.

We know the average age for starting to drink in Ireland is about sort of 15, 16, but parents should not be facilitating that entry into the world of drinking.

It is happening.

And I would applaud that parent who doesn't give that permission.

Does that guarantee her son or daughter won't drink?

Of course it doesn't.

But what the research tells us very clearly, but Irish research, the winners of the Young Scientist exhibition about 10 years ago confirmed this with Irish research, that where teenagers are given parental permission to drink, they are the ones who give themselves the most permission to drink when they're in settings unsupervised by parents.

So they drink in the highest risk manner because they've already been given parental permission to drink.

Albeit with rules and caveats like you can only have two cans.

Those rules go out the window once they're out with their mates.

So don't do it.

That's the advice.

Yeah.

And it's a pity that I suppose some parents out there might go, well, I fully trust my son and he's, you know, he makes really wise decisions and therefore I know he's only 16, but I trust him.

Yeah.

To give the rest of us a break who maybe aren't blessed with such wise, sensible sons and daughters.

The more parents who break rank on this issue, the harder it is for us and our kids to hold the line.

I suppose cannabis is the first drug that teenagers are likely to be exposed to, but that can happen certainly quite commonly in mid-teens.