Lights out! How one country switched off teenage delinquency    

At an age when many teenagers lock themselves in their rooms, Kristjan likes to spend as much time as possible with his parents and the walls of his bedroom are plastered with his proudest exploits in fishing and football.
He helps illustrate how Iceland has nearly eradicated abuse of alcohol, tobacco and drugs among teens in two decades through measures such as curfews, raising the age of majority and promoting sports. 
It is a stunning turnaround for a country that discovered rising worrying trends among its youth in the early 1990s, peaking in 1997.
Nearly half of 15- and 16-year-olds surveyed at the time said they drank alcohol the previous month, one in four smoked tobacco and 17 per cent said they smoked cannabis.
“[At that time] anybody walking in the streets of Reykjavik would be scared on a Friday or Saturday night,” says US psychologist Harvey Milkman, involved in the project since its launch.
“Teenagers were walking around drunk and they were rude, they were loud and boisterous. It seemed even dangerous. So the whole society got concerned, not just the parents,” adds Milkman, professor at the Metropolitan State College of Denver.

‘A wake-up call’ 
Helgi Gunnlaugsson, a sociology professor at the University of Iceland, said the high figures came as a “shock” to many.
“It was like a wake-up call,” he says. 
In 1997, the government launched the “Youth in Iceland” initiative, using questionnaires to build a credible snapshot of a generation.
Anonymous participants were asked when they had last had an alcoholic drink, whether they had ever been drunk or tried smoking, and, if so, how often.
Within a few years, authorities and social workers felt they knew enough to take concrete action.
A curfew was imposed on 13- to 16-year-olds, who are banned from being outside unaccompanied after 10pm, extended until midnight during Iceland’s summer of long days and bright nights.
Lawmakers raised the age of majority by two years to 18, banning sale of tobacco to minors and alcohol to anyone under 20. 

Football, fishing, bowling 
The government also promoted sports and a healthy, wholesome lifestyle.
Many Icelanders see the emphasis on sporting activity as a factor behind the rise in popularity of football in the small North Atlantic island, whose national team sent England home in humiliating defeat at the Euro 2016 competition.
“I’m really happy to just play football with my friends and train hard,” says Kristjan, who practises five times a week on the artificial turf in Breidholt, a neighbourhood in Reykjavik.
Sporting a short ponytail like that of his footballing idol Sweden’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Kristjan has just been selected to play in Iceland’s under-16 squad.
The programme also advocated “more closeness, attention and sharing” within the family. As well as raising parental awareness, it encouraged schools to get involved in teens’ behaviour too.
“We do more things with our children than [families did] in the past,” says Kristjan’s mother Asdis Mikaels, who especially enjoys bowling parties with her son.
Within eight years of the programme’s launch, the figures fell by just over 50 per cent.
By last year, the percentage of young people, who reported drinking in the previous month, dropped to five per cent, regular smokers dropped to three per cent, while seven per cent said they used cannabis.
Although in line with current trends in Europe – as shown by surveys conducted by the cross-national European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs – Iceland is the only country where the change has been so dramatic. 
More than 30 cities in other countries, mostly in Europe, have also experimented with the Icelandic model since 2006.
“It may be technically much more complicated to have a joint effort from the whole community and municipalities, but not impossible,” says Gunnlaugsson, noting that Iceland, with only 340,000 inhabitants, has the same population as the French city of Nice.
“There is also a national mentality [in Iceland] that you can change things for the better.”