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Britain’s ‘New Puritans’: Youth Drinking Falls Dramatically

A pub in the Soho neighborhood of London. According to multiple reports, alcohol consumption among British youth has plummeted.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

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 Ms. 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 W.H.O. study, about 26 percent of European 15-year-olds drank alcohol at least once a week, but by 2014, that had dropped to 13 percent. The surveys measured England, Scotland and Wales separately, but their results were similar, and taken together, the share of 15-year-olds who were regular drinkers there fell from about 46 percent to about 10 percent.

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 percent of people aged 8 to 12 said they had tried alcohol, but in 2016, just 4 percent had. In 2001, it found, only 12 percent of English 16- and 17-year-olds considered themselves non-drinkers; in 2016, that was up to 35 percent.

“The scale of change is such that some news outlets have labeled 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. (Youth drinking has also declined significantly in the United States — where underage binge drinking has taken center stage in Supreme Court confirmation hearings — but it has long been less prevalent than in Europe, and has not dropped as sharply.)

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 nonprofit 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,” Mr. 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 behavior people might prefer to forget.

“There’s a trend of greater sense of health consciousness among young people,” Mr. Nicholls added. “There’s a move away from alcohol and drugs, there’s less of a culture of intoxication.”

Under government pressure and the threat of losing their licenses, British pubs, once known for being lax about underage drinking, have grown much more vigilant over the last generation about demanding identification from young patrons. The Sheffield study looked at where underage drinkers were when they had tried to get alcohol, and the source that declined the most, by far, was pubs.

Alex Boote, 19, a student at University College of London who grew up in Cornwall, said he drank primarily at parties before turning 18, but even then, he said, it was only an occasional thing.

“I think that at that age the idea is that you drink to get drunk,” he said. “And I do think it’s still definitely considered cool when you’re young — smoking is what has become a lot less cool than it used to be.”

But he supported the theory that social media has helped drive adolescent alcohol consumption downward, “because it gives people more ways to impress others than getting drunk at parties.”

Alcohol has become more expensive in Britain over the last decade, driven in part by higher taxes, which may help dissuade young drinkers. Some young people guessed a reason for the decline is that their peers have become more likely to resort to drugs like marijuana and ecstasy, which are often more accessible to minors than alcohol.

“I suppose it was a combination of it being more cool and more enjoyable,” said James Samouel, a 19-year-old history student who grew up in south London, referring to marijuana use by peers. “A health thing as well — alcohol is so much worse for you.”

But in fact, surveys show that drug use, while still common, has also become less prevalent among young people.

“It doesn’t seem that people are switching from drinking to drugs,” said Dr. Melissa Oldham, the lead author of the Sheffield University report. “It’s a move away from alcohol and drugs to other hobbies.”

Mr. Nicholls pointed to another possible explanation for young people turning away from alcohol. Their parents grew up in an era when youth drinking was more common and may still be regular drinkers.

“If it’s what your parents did,” he said, “it’s not cool.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Britain’s ‘New Puritans’: Youth Drinking Falls Dramatically. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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