Although I wouldn’t be happy with this family friend, my main focus, if I were you, would be the 18 and 20 year olds.
My son told me an amazing story from his month in Spain. The city had it’s annual summer festival and hundreds of kids met on the beach each night, drinking and doing drugs. He told us than a never-ending parade of ambulances just kept pulling up and hauling kids away. The police only seemed to care if the kids looked to be 12 or younger.
I do know two sets of parents that allow their kids and friends to drink in their homes. I’ve voiced my opinion about it being wrong, but it continues. I really believe they allow it because they see it as a way of increasing their kids’ popularity, which is sad.
In my state it is perfectly legal for a parent to offer alcohol at home to their children. There is no law being broken in that scenario. I never offered alcohol to my kids, but both of them asked for a glass of wine at a holiday meal around the age of 20 or so, and we allowed it. I noticed that neither of them drank much of it. Both are now over 21.
I would NEVER offer alcohol to minors for many reasons, but first and foremost for the legal liability, and secondly, out of respect for the fact that it’s not my call to make and I wouldn’t blame a parent for being angry.
It is legal for me to serve my own kids alcohol in my state. I offer wine now and then, champagne at New Years. We are beer geeks and every now and then we let S sample a beer. So far, he dislikes them all.
I have only once ever given someone else’s under 21 kid alcohol. Her dad was there and OK with it. It was a beer at a picnic and she was 20. Aside from that type of situation, no way am I giving other people’s kids alcohol.
Marian, my son has an August birthday and was older than many of his school friends, so we did have that discussion. He has never been much of a drinker and said it was not a problem but I’m sure he did buy beer for the apartment he lived in his final year of college (I could see his debit card charges as they were still linked to mine at that time). He bought for his apartment room mates as he believed they were responsible, but they did not throw large parties. Still made me a bit nervous at the time.
My kids were allowed to drink a glass of wine at dinner if they wanted when they were 17 & up. DD drank legally on her study abroad in Europe and in the Caribbean several times. We were not the cool house for parties, no alcohol allowed here for other people’s kids.
I live in a small town. Here’s what goes on at the house where the cool parents live. The Mom (who attends my weekly devotional lunch) just got out of rehab. Their cool kid college freshman son was found drunk and passed out in a campus parking lot during the first week of school and was arrested. It appears that no alcohol consumption lessons were learned at the cool house.
We could never get our kids to drink alchohol even though we tried! I’d never ever give another kid who was under 21 alcohol without permission from their parents, but honestly it never came up. Once everyone turned 21 my sons’ friends would drink wine if they had dinner with us, and they drink the occasional beer if they are playing games. I know here in NY it’s fine for parents to serve kids liquor in their own home and kids under 21 in something like a bartending course or wine making course are also allowed to partake.
There are many facets to this discussion, all kinds of threads going through it. Kids binge drinking and such has been a problem for a long time, and I am not entirely certain that the 21 drinking age helps things. It does help compared to the 18 yr old age, where high school seniors could buy alcohol and give it to other kids, so there was validity to that.
I don’t have a particular objection to the 21 drinking age, though I think the law should allow parents, if they want their kids to have beer or wine with dinner at a restaurant, should be allowed lattitude (I have been told that the federal law carved out an exemption on this, but most states make it illegal). I am one of those who doesn’t have a problem with underage kids having beer or wine with dinner let’s say, depending on age. One of the things people forget is that up until fairly recent times, things like beer, wine and hard cider were common beverages in this country, if you looked at the colonial era a lot of the carrie nation types who promoted how pure people were would be aghast, the quantities consumed were pretty high, and this kept on through a lot of the 19th century. Why? Because quite frankly, they were safe to drink, water was not always so available, milk without refrigeration was dangerous, so that is what people drank. There were obviously problems with too much drinking and prob alcoholism, but given the amount being drunk by families, it is likely that as a percentage the abusers were pretty small percentage.
In Europe (leaving out modern times), in countries like France and Italy, and in most of Europe, kids would drink wine growing up, they would start with wine mixed with water or with seltzer when younger, and then by their teens they would drink wine or beer…and again, this was quite common, and yet the rates of alcoholism and such among kids back then, or even as adults, was not sky high. What this makes me think is that kids being able to drink beer and wine at home neither is the perfect cure for binge drinking, nor is it the cause of it.
My son could have wine (kids don’t like beer, nor surprisingly) at home if he wanted it with dinner, and he doesn’t get drunk on it, never has, and he does have wine with him at school in his apartment, and probably a bottle of blackberry brandy, but he doesn’t abuse it, doesn’t want to. Like I said, I don’t think drinking at home or ‘learning about drinking’ necessarily will stop the kid from drinking to extremes, but I think it takes away some of the impetus when kids do what kids do. Put it this way, when I was growing up, the kids that tended to go overboard were the parents who would freak at the idea of kids drinking beer or wine before the legal age, the especially strident parents, were generally the kids who went the most wild IME.
That said, I also was pretty clear with my son about proper and improper drinking and I stressed that like anything in life, it can be abused, and that when you abuse it you pay consequences. I also would never, ever offer alcohol to an underage kid unless I knew the parents and they were okay with it, and I most certainly would not buy alcohol for other kids, period. That is their parent’s right to determine, and I would never assume the right for other kids.
I have also seen the results of what happens when kids who have grown up around alcohol intolerant parents do when they get some freedom. In the music world, on my son’s instrument (violin), as in music as a whole, a lot of the kids are coming from Asia, and among those kids a lot of them come from backgrounds where the parents are very anti alcohol (many of them because of the type of Christianity they practice). These kids get to music schools in the US and Europe and many of them go nuts, and drinking is a big part of it. At one major conservatory, during the orientation period of number of kids ended up in the hospital being treated for alcohol poisoning, and most of those kids were from the backgrounds I describe…so what I do know is that the carrie nation, alcohol is evil thing doesn’t work well, either.
It is interesting, because I think the answer to disparate things, like why they are having a problem with heavy drinking in Europe among young people, and the issues I talk about is here, are related. I think that kids are being given mixed messages about drinking, there is the incredible pressure of media depictions of drinking, an advertising, that has put even more pressure on them, I suspect that is part of what happened in Europe. Another big factor I suspect is that in Europe kids drinking alcohol was under the auspices of family, it would happen at family meals and such…today, Europe has seen the same thing that the US has issues with, there isn’t the family center as there once was, you have two parents working, and kids away from their parents a lot more. I suspect that is behind the heavy drinking, it could even be that given that family meals and such are a dying thing, there isn’t much drinking going on at home anymore, so kids are doing it with their friends…
One thing I think is critical, and this is something no one will convince me differently of. Some of the kids I talked about whose parents would freak about kids drinking, themselves were not exactly tee totallers, would go to parties and get drunk (I know, my sister used to babysit for a lot of them when the kids were younger)…parents send a mixed mesage, they tell them alcohol is bad, or isn’t appropriate for them, then demonstrate less than stable use of it. It doesn’t add up, and kids see right through the hypocrisy, you cannot tell kids they cannot handle drinking while demonstrating lack of control, kids attitudes are caught, not taught. I still think that teaching kids to respect alcohol at home by allowing them exposure to alcohol in a responsible way while modeling it ourselves can work, but I also am rational enough to know that for example, with my son he had a kind of throwback family, we were fortunate where my wife was SAHM and we ate dinners together, and also that my wife and I are not big drinkers (we kid outselves we still have booze from when we were married 26 years ago…). I think that parents need to be consistent, and if you make booze out to be this heady thing, then don’t abuse it yourselves.
I am not responding to anyone in particular, but I think the notion that teaching kids about alcohol by letting them have a glass of wine at home is just plain ridiculous. It does not compare in any way shape or form to binge drinking. So what is it going to teach? It is not at all like beer pong or shots of tequila or large quantities stupid flavored vodka. The physiological sensation just does not compare, nor does the company! I was allowed and offered wine at dinner as a teenager, and what it gave me was the impression that my parents wouldn’t be overly upset if I drank. (Well, they were pretty upset when I came home drunk at 15 1/2 drinking awful banana liquer as well as Mountain Dew mixed with beer and plenty of other stuff I can’t remember.) So at our house with my kids, I prefer to follow the law of the drinking age.
I agree with @Marsian. That “family friend” would be off my friend-list - permanently.
Not everyone who has let their child have a glass of wine at home is doing so to “teach them about alcohol.” My 20 y/o daughter asked us at Thanksgiving if she could have a glass of wine, and we said, “okay.” Because she was, in our estimation, old enough and mature enough to handle a glass of wine. Additionally, in our state, it was perfectly legal to honor her request. She didn’t do anything to make us think we had made a mistake. End of story.
Responding to LBowie:
Alcohol was never off limits in my house (to my sister and I at least). European mother who was, quite literally, raised in pubs (she lived over a pub in England that her family owned for many years while she was young). She thinks American laws around alcohol are stupid (I concur).
I learned very early on that I don’t like wine- so I never drink it. I learned what beer I liked and what I didn’t. More importantly, I learned what my limit was and where was a safe place to drink and where wasn’t. (I’ve been drunk a grand total of maybe 5 times in my life- once at 15 and the rest at the age of 22 or older. Learned at 15 that being drunk wasn’t that much fun and didn’t do it again for many years.)
I am not saying that parents should or should not allow their underage children to drink (I won’t even touch letting other people’s kids drink), but some kids DO learn their limits by drinking at home rather than learning by being around a bunch of other 18 year olds who have never drank at college.
For me, I’d rather my kids learn at home. All a matter of preference.
Sure, I just read often on here how people want their children to “experience” what alcohol feels like so they allow them to have a glass of wine or whatever. I am just saying it won’t feel the same way at home during dinner as at a college (or high school) party, and no one should fool themselves that it is. Allowing your own kids to have alcohol at home is your business, not mine. I am not condemning people who do so, just saying they may not be giving them the experience they think they are, and may even be giving them the wrong impression.
And how is that impression all that different if you won’t give your kid a glass of wine when they are 20 and 3/4 but you say ok at 21? IMO by that time, it’s basically immaterial. At least in our case when our kid didn’t ever ask until she was 20 or so. Just not that significant, imo.
Yes, I do agree on that point. Not much difference between 20 and 21. At that point, they would have had plenty of opportunities at parties at college, so if they were interested in drinking, it wouldn’t be their first time at dinner. At 16 or 17, though, a different story.
If they were interested at 16 or 17 they’ve probably had a drink already at some HS party.
I would never serve other people’s children. But my own? yeah. Family traditions and celebrations but never any time else. Gotta draw a line somewhere.
I grew up when the drinking age was 18. My parents would let me sample stuff when I was much younger. I honestly didn’t care for any of it. Nor got drunk at any time. But trying it was never a big deal. I personally think it made it easier to say no to peer pressure–been there, done that (even if I hadn’t really in some heavy party context).
What surprises me to this day is the number of kids I knew who hit college for the first time that never having sampled alcohol and binged. It was really a form of parental rebellion.
@ gouf-
I tend to agree with you, that is my experience as well. I can only speak of my own experience, but because my parents didn’t make a big deal about alcohol, I never understood the other kid’s fascination with it or the obsession to get bombed all the time. In high school, I was at parties and such with alcohol, I would have a beer or two, but it never dawned on me to get drunk like that, just didn’t make much sense to me. I can only speak for myself, but if I was going to rebel against my parents, and I did, alcohol was the last thing I would think of, because to be truthfully honest, they didn’t make a big deal out of it. I had sampled harder liquor (tasted it), and other than maybe fruit brandy, I didn’t like it much, wine or beer were okay, but I had them enough with dinner at home held no real interest.
I don’t think it is much about learning to drink rather than taking the mystique out of it, the taboo nature of it. If a kid has parents who don’t make a big deal about alcohol, what is the thrill of getting stone cold drunk as rebellion against the parents? One of the wisest pieces of wisdom my mom ever told me was that with kids, they often are looking for a reaction when they do stupid things, and if you don’t react, it soon sends the message not a lot of fun in that. If I had gone out to a party in high school and gotten drunk and had to call home to get my parents, I know they wouldn’t be happy I got drunk, but I also knew that they wouldn’t go over the moon the way a lot of parents would, I wouldn’t get the it is against the law, how could you, we didn’t raise you that way, so what would be the point?
I also think quite honestly that by allowing the kid to try alcohol at home, it also balances out the mixed message parents often give, where they are basically telling the kid “of course we drink, we are adults, we are superior to you, you can’t handle it”, it is like putting a red flag in front of the bull. I think, too, that parents often refuse to talk about their own experiences with alcohol, at college or whatnot, they make it look like they were these angels where they never did anything like that, they were all so responsible and whatnot, so the kids rebel against that, too…rather than talk about the reality, that the kind of drinking in alcohol led to a trip to the hospital, how a friend of hers got raped, beat up, whatever, it says “hey, kid, I have been there, and here is what I found” rather than “YOU WERE DRINKING ALCOHOL!!! For Shame! At your age I was in church 12 hours a day praying for lost family members” lol.
As far as the drinking age goes, all I can tell you is that that alone doesn’t do a very good job at preventing binge drinking, I see plenty of kids in their 20’s in NYC who you see on the street outside bars and clubs, drunk as heck, puking in the street or alleys, getting into all kinds of trouble, and apparently, dringe binking post college is still a major league sport among the 20 something set (you should see what a night out with a bunch of 20 something investment bankers is like, not a pleasant site).
Let me add I am not suggesting all parents let their kids drink at home, or that it is a cure for binge drinking in all cases, or that those who don’t allow it are wrong (or that those who do are always right), I am just saying that I think that treating alcohol as some sort of big taboo is one of the big feeders to the kind of binge drinking we talk about, and that showing kids that it isn’t that a big a deal by allowing them to experience it at home may help take away the incentive to binge drink. It isn’t that I am a teetotaller, or that I haven’t gotten drunk in college or as an adult, but it never was really binge drinking, you could count on my fingers on two hands the number of times i have gotten drunk, and have extra fingers (and I don’t have 6 fingers on each hand, either:)
I disagree with most of the posters here. Our state says it is legal to serve your kids in your own house and we do. In HS we were pretty strict about things (and one kid didn’t drink until they were a senior while the other didn’t start until 2nd year of college). My youngest is a senior now but doesn’t drink.
Anyway, our attitude is different for the college age kids. They are going to drink. We do not allow them to have parties but when our family has a party and our college kids are invited, along with their boyfriends/girlfriends, we let them drink because we know their parents allow them. We make sure they don’t drink too much and never let them leave with their keys (or leave at all if they are drunk).
I’m with the posters who are adamant that no one has a right to serve my underage children alcohol. I alone will decide when and if they can drink. Honestly, I have no problem with MY (underage) kids drinking at home, as a family, wine with dinner, a beer on the deck. I would never allow someone else’s underage child to drink at my house or in my presence. I still have an issue with the legal ones drinking at parties at my house, it can get out of hand and then I want to take keys, haha. My older son’s friends like to party. D claims she’ll never drink…we’ll see lol.
"Sure, I just read often on here how people want their children to “experience” what alcohol feels like so they allow them to have a glass of wine or whatever. "
I think that’s silly because a glass of wine is a perfectly pleasant thing!
My H doesn’t drink, and I might have 4 glasses of wine over a year. Just doesn’t appeal to us. No alcoholism in family. We would have alcohol in the house, but the bottles were usually covered with dust as we had so few occasions to use / serve it.
When ours were - not really sure, maybe 14? - we said ok, you want to know what alcohol tastes like? We lined up a bunch of bottles on the kitchen sink. Here’s rum. Here’s vodka. Here’s scotch. Etc. (we didn’t let on that people mix this stuff with other stuff to be palatable, lol). So they took sips and of course ewwww, gag, retch, spit it out. I was fine with that.