Kids drinking and not driving
Imagine for a moment that you’re a parent with a teenage son. He doesn’t drink, but you know his friends do. You’re also not naive. You’ve read the government’s statistics: 47 percent of high school students tell researchers they’ve had a drink of alcohol in the previous 30 days. Thirty percent have had at least five drinks in a row in the past month. Thirteen percent admitted to having driven in the previous month after drinking alcohol.
So, what do you do with regard to your son’s social life? Many parents have decided to take a realist’s approach. They’re throwing parties for their kids and their friends. They serve alcohol at these parties, but they also collect car keys to make sure no one drives home until the next morning. Their logic makes sense: The kids are going to drink; it’s better that they do it in a controlled, supervised environment.
I concur. My parents let me drink when I was young. Their theory was that if I was home then I wasn’t out driving, which could lead to my own or others’ death. Plus, it’s like the forbidden fruit in that if you aren’t forbidden from doing it, it becomes slightly less appealing.
August 10th, 2005 at 12:14 pm
That is of course, assuming they have parental permission from every minor attending the party. (Which I’m sure they don’t.)
Say, teens are also going to have unprotected sex. Maybe they should start throwing orgy parties and making sure everyone uses a condom.
August 10th, 2005 at 12:21 pm
I concur on the parental permission part. Regarding the sex analogy, I disagree with the comparison as sex leads to disease or unwanted pregnancies. Beer just leads to hangovers (or a fucked up liver in 40 years if taken to excess).
August 10th, 2005 at 1:31 pm
So I know this girl whose parents used this line of reasoning when they found out she was smoking as an early teenager:
She’ll do it even if we tell her not to.
Telling her not to may make her want to do it more.
She’s too young to buy cigarettes legally.
So she’ll probably steal them.
We don’t want our daughter shoplifting.
Therefore we’ll buy cigarettes for her.
I don’t agree with the “they’ll do it anyway” approach. If that’s a great approach to parenting, why doesn’t it apply to not doing homework, stealing, lying, etc.?
August 10th, 2005 at 1:34 pm
I think there’s a difference between encouraging stealing, smoking, etc. You can’t apply the same logic to all situations or all vices. At some point, it will be legal for kids to drink (i.e., when they turn 21) so acclimating them to it might be a good thing. No one should encourage people to smoke. And stealing is illegal.
August 10th, 2005 at 4:56 pm
“And stealing is illegal.”
Well, drinking underage is illegal. And so is serving alcohol to minors. So if you give your kids beer you’re not exactly instilling respect for the law.
One of my big concerns is that if we say “Well, he’ll be able to drink when he’s 21, might as well let him have a taste now that he’s 20,” that leads pretty soon to giving him a taste when he’s 18 (before he moves out on his own), to 15 (he’ll be driving soon) and so on. Honestly, I’m not a fan of slippery slope arguments but I don’t see where this ends. Clayton Cramer writes about knowing parents in California who were giving their kids as young as 13 booze and grass on the theory that they’d do it anyway, so it was better if they got it from their parents.
Beyond general arguments about parental discipline, there’s another reason to discourage kids from drinking. I think it’s a good bet that drugs and alcohol have different and more drastic effects on developing minds than they do on fully-developed minds.
August 10th, 2005 at 4:58 pm
So, does this mean Katie can’t come over? 🙂
August 10th, 2005 at 11:08 pm
Sure, just don’t put vodka in her formula. 😉