D caught drinking. What is a parent to do?

Parent Cafe
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<p>I would not allow the car - for all of the reasons mentioned - and I agree with Hunt, I would offer to drive her home once a week. I have a daughter who only comes home at breaks - but if your daughter needs that time with you, this is not a good time to take away that safety net. </p>

<p>However, I would pay for the hospital bill. I think it is really important to convey that you are not trying to punish, or teach her a lesson as much as you are doing what you need to do to keep her safe. </p>

<p>I think she needs to hear loud and clear how much you love her. Paying the bill says we care for you even when you screw up (but we aren’t going to make it easy to screw up again).</p>

<p>Plus - it gives you the energy to stick to the harder issue, which will be the car. :)</p>

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<p>I don’t agree with workinprogress that paying one’s own bills in this case is punishment. </p>

<p>And I think ominousrun has a good point that I’d add to. ORun said- “She might be more tempted to rebel because of the harsh restrictions you have placed on her.”
But I’d add that she also might not like the freedoms. Not like Freedoms? Yes, to be treated like an adult. An adult gets their own car if they want one, pays their own mtge or rent, pays their own food, insurance, clothes, etc. Does D want her freedom to do as she pleases? Maybe letting her have her freedom to be an adult won’t sound so appealing when fully explained to her. In a discussion about D’s behavior, parents are likely to hear that D feels she is an adult. Be ready.</p>

<p>Children that are not quite truly adults often feel “I can rule over my own life, but mommy and daddy must pay my bills.” My S felt that way, I felt that way, it’s nothing new.</p>

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<p>Younghoss - my advice comes from experience, not with my child, but as the child. </p>

<p>I may be wrong, but the heavy-handed approach just didn’t work with me. I was lucky to have had another couple (friends of my parents) who had known me from the time I was a toddler who intervened and conveyed their love when I was pretty unlovable (Not that OP has suggested her D is unlovable). Their willingness to help out when I didn’t deserve it made a huge impression on me and ultimately saved me. </p>

<p>So - my advice may be wrong. Who knows? But I will always advocate for toughness balanced with a display of support.</p>

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<p>“Telling her she can ride the bus is, in my opinion, punitive, and that’s not really the message you want to send.”</p>

<p>She did a really stupid thing (no reflection on your D, op, just the act). I’d say punitive is very appropriate.</p>

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<p>

Most likely, she went to a party and drank too much. I think it’s counterproductive to punish her for behavior that is an everyday occurence at most colleges. If you feel differently about this, don’t let your kid go to a college that countenances drinking.</p>

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<p>I am a sophomore in college and have a few things to add to this topic.</p>

<p>First of all, I never lived in the 70’s, but the argument that “this never happened when I was in school” seems to me like a load of BS for a number of reasons</p>

<p>1) Everyone goes to different types of schools, some campuses have more of a drinking culture than others</p>

<p>2) There is more awareness about binge drinking now than there ever was in the 70’s. People as a whole are generally more responsible and careful than they were back then. This is in large part due to groups like MADD and other organizations that do a good job of publishing useful information. </p>

<p>3) There is a much greater “spread” of information now than there was in the 70’s. If you went to college in the 70’s you wouldn’t know about the drinking culture of an other school, or even a different group within your same school because there weren’t media outlets like collegeconfidential or mtv or gossip blogs like gawker or ivygate or basically anything of that sort that would connect you to other groups of people with whom you wouldn’t normally interact. </p>

<p>Therefore if you think to yourself “No one would ever go to the hospital for drinking back when I was your age” you should stop and ask yourself if that is because your view are the 100% truth, or because </p>

<p>1)people weren’t educated on what “too drunk” is, so no one was ever too drunk because no one cared
2)you weren’t exposed to that group of people due to the different social networks back then
3)You percieve that more people are going to the hospital now than back then because media outlets report it more frequently</p>

<p>IIRC, the data amongst many college campuses shows that the rates of binge drinking have slowly decreased over time and many of the policies they have enacted, including being open about drinking, discourage the formation of harmful habits. </p>

<p>If I were in your situation I would have your daughter go to a counselor. Not an ALANON counselor but just a general counselor and follow their recommendations on how to deal with your problems, or find out if there are any problems. If your daughter actually has a serious problem with something, she needs to talk with someone about it. Counseling will do her much better than some punishment if she really has the history of problems you claim she has. In fact, if she has the history you say she does punishing her could actually be harmful for her development in the long run by causing her to blame you as her parents as the negative force in her life rather than the real demons she actually needs to confront to become a better person. I have been through this before on the Child’s end when my parents got divorced and counseling helped change me more than paying some stupid bills ever would.</p>

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<p>The fact that your daughter complained of the friend being a snitch leads me to believe this is NOT an isolated incident, not the first time.</p>

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<p>If your D is in an accident and there is serious damage to property or life, you could easily be sued. If she has a prior hospitalization for alcohol poisoning (they don’t keep you just because your drunk, they keep you if your alcohol levels present a danger) you could lose quite a lot financially. They would use that against you and her. If she hurts someone or kills them, your insurance would likely not cover all the award, and your own insurance could turn around and sue you for their portion. </p>

<p>NO CAR NO WAY.</p>

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<p>TBoone - you make some reasonable points, but in other ways you are off the mark. It’s not like we didn’t have friends that went to other schools and we never communicated our college experiences! Yes, there is more awareness today than their used to be, but I don’t recall “pre-gaming” as a prelude to partying at all. And this was mostly because 18 was a legal drinking age for most. For some, 18 gave you the bar and for others 18 gave you at the very least 3.2 beer. While I don’t know all state laws, I think Pennsylvania was the only state (my home state) that had a drinking age of 21. I spent my summers in a NY community that had people from pretty much all over the US, you could legally walk into a bar at 18 and it just wasn’t the culture to binge drink like the kids do now, and it certainly wasn’t our habit to drink a ton of hard liquor, which seems pretty prevalent as a pre-gaming drink these days. A vodka tonic at a bar was a lot more expensive than a pitcher of beer. And the problem with drinking fast and furious before you even leave the dorm to go out at night is that you are not as drunk as you’re going to be as that alcohol continues to invade your blood stream. </p>

<p>You don’t need facebook or the internet to know that the more things change, the more they stay the same in some ways and is why parents today are in a difficult situation when it comes to punishing their children for something they did legally at the same age. However, going to the hospital (and be real here… would your friends send you off in an ambulance or get you to the hospital if you were just sloppy drunk?) is a very serious matter. </p>

<p>I honestly believe that the harsh penalties on college campuses push the drinking culture further underground than it ever was in our day. And while it is true that MADD has done an excellent job of changing the culture about drinking and driving, it doesn’t really address the fact that college kids are going to end up drinking and will have few options beyond hiding it considerably, causing far more to over drink to the point of poisoning. Perhaps we didn’t have the access to such instant information as we do today, but studies show that binge drinking has gone beyond dangerous levels. </p>

<p>I can say this much… we mostly drank a lot of beer. Attended a lot of keg parties. And it just seems to me that we were dealing with full bladders a lot more than we were debating a call to 911.</p>

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<p>^^^^^^^^^^Yep, that’s right.</p>

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<p>A friend went through this with her daughter a couple of years ago. The RA called 911 because the daughter passed out and couldn’t be woken up. This is what they are trained to do because it can be a life-or-death situation. My friend has learned that this is also what the kids are told during freshman orientation, so it’s probably what the “snitch” did. In other words, in spite of what your daughter might tell you, she was in serious danger and it is a big deal.</p>

<p>Daughter was responsible for the costs for the ambulance, hospital, doctors, court, etc. She didn’t have the money on hand, so is doing payments with her mom. The school wouldn’t let her register for the following semester until the bills were paid. The court proceedings (underage drinking reported by the hospital) included a fine and attendance at meetings. The meetings were very good for her. My friend didn’t do anything additional in terms of punishment. As an 18-year-old, the law treated the daughter like an adult, and my friend just followed the lead set by that.</p>

<p>Your daughter’s state law and school rules may differ.</p>

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<p>I would say that taking away the car is fine. She should not be drinking and driving, and having a car when you live 10 miles away is certainly a luxury. However, I agree with others that you might not know the whole story. One hospitalization, when you don’t know the details, doesn’t make an alcoholic. It certainly shows poor-decision making, but I don’t think that it is an uncommon behavior among college freshmen. Therapy is certainly an option to see if there are other issues at hand, and I think that it is worth reiterating that drinking to a black-out state is not healthy.</p>

<p>I don’t think that you should make her pay the hospital bills. If her BAC was actually dangerously high, then it is good that she ended up in the hospital. If, god forbid, she gets herself into the situation again, you do not want her not going to the hospital for monetary reasons. Her health is the most important thing.</p>

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<p>"If you feel differently about this, don’t let your kid go to a college that countenances drinking. "</p>

<p>Hunt, </p>

<p>Forget college. LIFE countenances drinking. I am a non-drinker and have faced a kind of ‘discrimination’. People want you to drink because it makes them feel better about their drinking. I like to turn the tables and question WHY a person can’t have a great time without it. For example, if you are dating someone who needs to drink to have fun with you - I think you’re in the wrong relationship - and vice versa!</p>

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<p>PEOPLE do this? No one I know. Way to generalize.</p>

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<p>

I don’t drink, either, and I have to say that I can’t recall any occasion, in my entire life, when anybody pushed me to drink. Even in college, when at parties where everybody was drinking. Most people choose to drink, though, because it’s an accepted activity in our society.</p>

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<p>If you don’t think that there is ANY pressure at all on college campuses to drink, then I don’t know which college campuses you’ve been to recently. However, the pressure is not so overwhelming that an adult can’t be expected to be able to say “yes” or “no” as they please. Unless you’ve been drugged or something, no one can force you to drink alcohol to the point of needing to be hospitalized (hazing rituals aside). </p>

<p>I think it’ll be rough for the OP to even find a college that doesn’t “countenance” drinking. While there are dry campuses, some of the really strict regulations simply push it underground where it’s almost as risky as at the major “party schools”. The decision to avoid alcohol altogether or to consume it as responsibly as possible starts with the individual; the school and the culture can affect it significantly, but not to the point where the individual has no control at all.</p>

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<p>A lot of times, when adults say things like “Back when I was coming up, life was nearly perfect, but nowadays everything is completely different.” they’re lying or confabulating, but in this case it really was like that. It has to do with all of the factors mentioned above (drinking age at 18, different attitude towards certain types of alcohol). You are right about increased awareness but there is a serious and alarming trend with things like pre-gaming for hours before partying that is contributing to alcohol problems.</p>

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<p>The problem isn’t simply that she drank to excess and was hospitalized. The red flag here is that she’s minimizing the incident, denying that there was any danger, and blaming others. </p>

<p>I would view it as a totally different story if the student spent the night in the hospital and came out ashamed, frightened, and grateful that nothing worse happened. I’ve seen it happen, and that’s a student who is likely to learn important lessons from the experience and never repeat it. In this case, the D has essentially told the OP that she doesn’t believe there’s any lesson in the experience except to avoid snitches. I would assume therefore assume that she’s going to keep drinking this way in snitch-free situations.</p>

<p>That being the case, should she be given the use of someone else’s car? In my view, hell no. That’s an easy call. Sharing the hospital record with her parents, so they can make an informed judgment about how they want to spend their money, should be an absolute requirement before the parents pay another dime to keep her in the dorm where she endangered herself. If the record shows a fairly safe, moderate BAC and appropriate behavior in the ER, then maybe the “snitch” really did overreact. But if D won’t show the record, then she’s declaring her wish to be an independent adult, and she should pay her own way from now on.</p>

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<p>“Im not a statistician, but I don’t really call 40% of women binge drinking at some point to be equivalent of ‘commonplace @ most colleges’”</p>

<p>This statistic may be true at most schools, but at some particularly known for partying, that percentage probably goes above 75-80%. I know at my small LAC this holds true, and the amount of alcohol poisonings I have seen is sometimes daunting. “Blackouts” can be commonplace, especially for freshmen. I know if a lot of these people had gone to another school where drinking wasn’t so common to the social aspect of college life, they wouldn’t be drinking nearly as much.</p>

<p>I would agree with posters saying that D should pay the hospital bill, and although this is a cause for concern it isn’t necessarily indicative of a drinking “problem” or future events. It is serious, but could have easily been an isolated incident without knowing other information. The depression meds could have interacted negatively with the alcohol, sending her to the hospital easier than her friends who could have been drinking the same amount.</p>

<p>EDIT: Also, I think Modadunn hit the nail on the head for why binge drinking seems like it’s a bigger problem now. My school has enacted new rules against drinking since I’ve started as a freshman, and consequently reported alcohol poisonings have increased. We have discussed this in different forums, and the same conclusion everyone comes up with is that driving drinking “underground” increases the brevity with which one drinks. People under 21 “pregame” going out extensively here, and the amount of liquor consumed often results in these issues. My freshman year, however, fraternity parties were more the norm with the relaxed drinking rules, so there was no point to try to chug as much as you could before you went out.</p>

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<p>With one parent in recovery and a history of an eating disorder and depression/anxiety, plus an overnight hospitalization for intoxication (and a blackout issue)….I don’t think that I am sticking my neck out here to say that your daughter is at very high risk for having inherited the disease herself. Good grades do not mean she isn’t at high risk or already in trouble. I have known alcoholics who could keep it very together for a long, long time (graduating with top grades from undergrad and grad schools) all while running with their disease and doing horrible damage to themselves. It sounds like you already know this, and also that you have the right Al-Anon approach. You know you can make it worse, so you are wisely poised to avoid doing so. </p>

<p>As always, the only thing you can do is control your side of the street, with decisions aimed only to maintain your own peace and serenity. Consequences to her should just be natural ones which result from you and your husband taking care of yourselves.</p>

<p>She should of course pay her own hospital bill. Good job, Mom and Dad! And yes, you should be sympathetic and loving about this, which I am sure you will be (anything else will dilute the experience for her with anger towards you instead of herself).</p>

<p>If one or both of the car and insurance are in your name, you do need to take protective action. If she does drive anyway, as your husband said, that is out of your control but it won’t be your consequence. You control what you can, and you accept the rest. You may already know this, but as a side note medical professionals in the addiction field recognize that the disease is much more virulent in young females than in males. So while her dad may remember his experiences, as a female her body is at a staggeringly higher risk for permanent damage, acquired shockingly sooner. Sorry to pass this on, but she needs to know it. Knowledge is power.</p>

<p>I would absolutely not allow her to keep her car on campus. If she lives ten minutes away, there is no problem with you providing transportation any time she wants to come home for a break (and you hope she will take you up on that frequently, because you love her so much and are thrilled whenever she is around). I don’t think this should be presented as giving her a consequence. Instead it is what you and your husband need to do to feel safe. It is not a punishment (which can be enraging for an alcoholic or a young adult). It is you setting the boundaries you need to set to live your life properly.</p>

<p>You should explain that you are willing to (as of now) allow her to drive the car when she is home, but that if she doesn’t adhere to whatever boundaries you have set when she does drive it there, you will have to remove her from your auto insurance and block her from using any car in your name. She is of course free, however, to get a car and insurance in her own name and pay for it herself. Anytime. This is not a punishment, or something you are doing to discipline her. It is something you need to do to feel safe, and to protect yourselves. </p>

<p>Unlike your daughter, you do not have a lifetime ahead of you to acquire assets. Whatever the size of your estate, you need that money to live on in your retirement and have a right to protect it from legal bills and lawsuits. You have a right to do what you need to do to take car of yourself, and you do not and should not wait until someone is diagnosed as a full-blown alcoholic to take these protection measures.</p>

<p>One thing I would also require, since you are still allowing her to be on your insurance and to drive a car which is (I assume) in your name: An alcohol and drug assessment/screening by a licensed chemical dependency professional. It is likely that the counseling office of your daughter’s school will do this for free. She should do this because of her personal and family health history, if nothing else then to start the dialogue for herself and as a proactive, preventative measure.</p>

<p>As a parent of a young person who could be at risk for alcoholism, taking the right action to protect yourself can “raise her bottom”. Powerful stuff. I do not see this as “tightening the apron strings”, which I believe is very counterproductive. Your daughter, in every cell of her being at her age, is hardwired to break the apron strings. What you can do to “not to make it worse” is to go along with that natural process. No guarantees, of course – your daughter’s health is ultimately, as you know, in her hands. But his is the best you can do for her, always in a loving way.</p>

<p>As for taking her off campus, I would not do that. It is an Al-Anon principal not to manipulate situations so others will behave as we see fit, or to “create a crisis” (or to prevent one if it is the natural course of events). You cannot stop the disease if she has it (only she can). You can only protect yourself. Anything you do just to protect her will do nothing, and could make things worse. If she wants to drink and party she will do so on or off campus.</p>

<p>About taking her to meetings, I think that if your husband wants to do that it would be a great idea. Personally, if you are a definite norm, I would leave that to him. Should she turn out to have the disease, maybe better that he introduce her to the world of AA. It can only help for her to sit through some good meetings. If she doesn’t take it all in, she will know where to go should she need it down the road. Might be extra beneficial if her dad was one of the speakers, or spoke and told his story at a regular open meeting. Even if she has heard all of his consequences and struggles before, hearing him share it at an AA meeting will be a powerful memory. </p>

<p>Aside from the issue of alcoholism, making a young adult take responsibility and realize that parents are separate and deserve to take care of themselves…always good things for encouraging growth.</p>

<p>Most importantly, I would head back to Al-Anon (you qualify whether or not she has the disease), especially since you mentioned that you feel terrified. It can’t hurt, and it is always good service to be there for others in the room, to be a loving listener whose presence can be a blessing.</p>

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<p>My experience in college age was that drinkers did push, but druggies did not. Druggies would offer, but if I said no- then that was it. Drinkers continued to encourage others to drink(but never forced).
otoh, the phrase “I don’t need to drink to have fun” is absolutely laughable. I haven’t heard that since high school. It assumes a drinker at a party can not have fun without it, and that is rarely true. It is intended to imply those who choose to drink MUST drink to have fun in an effort to make the fellow offering the drink feel bad and that just doesn’t hold true in my experience. The phrase tries to make a drinker justify why he chooses to drink as an excuse for why someone else chooses not to. The phrase is almost as juvenile as “I’m rubber and you’re glue…”. Many can drink and have fun, but I’ve never heard or seen a college drinker that must have booze to have fun. It can be part of some fun. It is common. But it all depends on the situation. I’ve seen drinkers go to movies sober, and have fun. There’s proof “must drink to have fun” is false. But those who attend a college party are likely to be drinkers. Personally, I choose to have fun many different ways. If I choose to attend a new Yrs eve party in a nightclub, I expect there will be booze consumed. I expect I will participate. If I attend a child’s school play I expect to have fun. I do not expect to drink hooch. Let’s face it, if I attend a pool party, I may choose to swim or not, but I have no right to complain about those who swim, or to condemn their swimsuits.
In the case of person 'A" needing a drink to have fun when dating person “B” the problem isn’t drink. The problem is the 2 are incompatible.</p>