<p>The semester I partied the hardest was my most productive and high performing semester in college. When I didn’t play as hard, I didn’t work as hard. Really. If I had to do it all over again, I would reserve certain nights, weeks for letting slip the dogs of havoc. On the other hand, I had a built in mechanism against the excesses of a lot of other students; I was a relative lightweight when it came to drinking.</p>
<p>Drinking age for beer was 18, 21 for liquor. in my state during my college years. I drank some but was not a regular bar crawler. I did most of my drinking when out with boyfriend (now H) and his friends who were all 3 years older. We got married before I turned 21 and sometimes when we went to bars on weekends, H would have to convince the guy at the door that he would absolutely not let his underage WIFE drink if he would just please let me in the bar with the rest of them!</p>
<p>I drank at parties, sometimes as much as 6 or 7 drinks over the course of a three or four hour evening. I never got sick or had hangovers or did anything I’m embarassed about now, though I probably talked too much. I’d smoke a joint when it was passed around at parties, but rarely got high (no good at inhaling though I tried!). I gave that up in grad school. I still have wine with dinner most days, and still drink at parties though less that I did. And for what it’s worth I did graduate magna cum laude with highest honors in my major.</p>
<p>Complete teetotaler in hs, drank very little in college and then not until I was about 20, never was a party animal. Instead I spent most of my hs and college years (commuted to local state college) faking my way through undiagnosed depression and trying to deal with the alcoholism I was surrounded by within my own family/extended family. Made myself the family “martyr”–worked practically every weekend, beginning in jr high, in a family owned bar and grill, in a seedy part of town, covering for my aunt in the kitchen. She and her invalid husband owned the place, she opened up every morning by 7 and stayed until closing most nights although could barely walk by 5:00 each evening. Came from a large extended Irish-Catholic family and “the bar” was the family hangout. </p>
<p>And the point of this thread was…???</p>
<p>I drank way too much in college. I was a binge drinker (drank til I passed out , threw up, the whole disgusting bit). Although I did O.K. in school and went on to law school, I deeply regret my drinking ways! I did not take advantage of all the opportunities afforded me at college, a lot of my time there is a bit fuzzy, and worst of all, I am sure I acted in a very selfish manner while I was drunk…Thank God I had some great (and selfless) friends to take care of me. I know my drinking stemmed out of insecurity. I may have appeared to be a party animal, but deep down inside, I was still a nerdy bookworm. Fortunately, I got my act together and drink very little now. I do enjoy a glass of wine with dinner when I go out. And I am still a proud bookworm! 
I hope and pray that my kids do not get sucked into the drinking culture…What a waste!
I have a question, Do I tell my kids about my drinking or not?</p>
<p>going from being raised on a pretty lively military base in the stoned out Vietnam draft era to a southern Baptist college was a big culture shock for me. We did have to run down to disco in Underground Atlanta a few times a year but binging was for the few and not the majority at my college. Vices often led my new classmates to some startling next day prayer meetings on the hall and expressed remorse. (My real vice was ten years of nicotine addiction when it was way past cool…no matter how many Virginia Slims ads were in the mags.)
One of my favorite memories…was my I Failed as a Rush Girl Party…going to the only rush/frat party I ever attended by bus to the mountains with a load of freshman sheep (girls I mean). Four hours of white lightening spiked punch and loud music later, only two girls boarded the bus for the ride back to our college. Myself and my future roommate, who I knew nothing about really except that she had been a waitress at Woolworths in a small town. She is now a tenured professor with a history of success in the performing arts and someone I admire. The ride back as losers on an empty bus sort of cleared our heads but good and makes us laugh to this day. Oh and curiousmother, I would vote to “share” with your older teens what you think now about your college drinking and its connection to social insecurity. Our kids can sort this out but they should know their parents’ experiences in my view–starting out with dealing with insecurity being a normal passage in college and something we all had to contend with and name it.</p>
<p>If there was any drinking age limit when I went to college in USSR, nobody enforced it. Anybody older than 16 could buy anything. Beer was not considered an alcoholic drink. Parties were generally held at people’s houses, were mostly rather small( included a sit-down dinner part) , had alcohol, but also lots of food, so very rarely anybody got too drunk. There was also absolutely NO drunk driving( nobody had cars) and if a person was considered too tipsy, he/she stayed overnight. I remember being drunk once, it was a good lesson on what not to drink. :-)</p>
<p>Drinking age was 18 back then in NYS. I didn’t go to college until age 20, since I had to pay for it myself. Sure, I went out to bars and drank, but only got sick once (my first semester - I hadn’t drank much before that, and tap beer - ugh! I still hate it). My dorm roommates who were freshman were going wild, mostly because they had never been on their own before. I had been on my own, with my own place, for 2 years.</p>
<p>I was a music major, and spent a lot of time in practice rooms or out doing gigs with a band. We couldn’t get drunk while playing, so that kind of limited things. </p>
<p>Drugs - no interest to me. I was a pothead first two years of HS, but gave it up when it started making me paranoid. Not a big drinker in HS either.</p>
<p>Not to say I didn’t have my share of wild times, but I can only thing of about 4 times that I had to much to drink and regretted it. Luckily nothing really bad happened. I had too much at stake, being an independent student - scholarship-wise and loan-wise - to blow it. I knew other students whose parents were paying for everything, and they were big partiers. I think as one poster pointed out, working and watching people drink is a great deterrent. I used to deal with obnoxious frat boy drunks on a regular basis while singing and playing in a band.</p>
<p>Curiousmother, I think your kids could learn alot from what you just posted. I’ve been honest with my kids from day one about my pot smoking in HS, and how ultimately it was a waste of time. I explained to them that I was a social misfit (we had moved about 10 times before I was 13) who only found acceptance with the druggies. Once I got more secure and happier and made more friends, I just left the pot smoking behind, realizing I’d never really liked it. </p>
<p>My husband was a huge drinker/druggie during HS, and we have been honest with our kids about it. He was also a juvenile delinquent who came from an awful home, and basically had to raise himself. He got his act together later on, and is now totally sober and a fitness nut. </p>
<p>I myself was never interested in hard drugs or LSD because I watched my older sister and her friends go through a lot in the late 60s/early 70s. I think that example really helped me a lot to avoid bad stuff. So yes, I think definitely tell your kids. It can open a lot of conversation. You’d be surprised at what they probably have had to confront already.</p>
<p>This reminds me of an incident when I was talking with a sales clerk at a store in a resort town. We discovered we were from the same state. I asked her if she was a college student and where she attended. She replied xyz university–where she informed me the entrance test was whether one could load a bong properly and roll a perfect joint. I replied that her parents must be so proud! To which she replied “My name is Rain, and my sisters are Storm and Flower–tell me my parents didn’t do drugs!” I conceded her point ;).</p>
<p>DO you think that your behaviors were influenced by what you saw your parents do? My parents were pretty heavy “social” drinkers a la John Cheever. I’d listen at the top of the stairs to all of the hoopla down below, and I just assumed that that’s what grown-ups did. (drink alot) Some of my college friends who didn’t have wild parents were more tame in the drinking department. Just interested in your thoughts on this.</p>
<p>I am sure every person was influenced by parental example, but I am sure mini or someone in the field can talk about patterns. I for one appreciated having parents who put the “Social” first in social drinking. In other words, they were people who enjoyed socializing once a week, and drank while at these gatherings but alcohol was more decorative and not key. They valued getting up feeling well each day and did not drink in excess. I saw many of my friends whose parents had alcohol problems that marred their family lives and many of those kids started out early and hard with excessive drinking when they were in their teens. I hope my S also feels that alcohol is somewhat superfluous to being Social, but time will tell.</p>
<p>Thank you Faline2 and Moonmaid for your kind words of advice…They certainly make a lot of sense!</p>
<p>My observations about parental influence (e.g. parents who are heavy "social’ drinkers generally having kids who drink a lot, and vice versa) are the same as those reported by dke and Faline2 above.</p>
<p>Coming from parents who drank absolutely no alcohol, nor socialized with any people who did–we two kids turned out very differently. As I stated above, in college I may have had a couple beers at a party in college (mostly to fit in and not have people constantly offering one), while my brother went the other extreme in college and partied heavily. Now as adults, I may have two or three drinks/year and my brother is a light social drinker, probably averaging a couple drinks a weekend.</p>
<p>I grew up determined not to allow alcohol to affect me the way it affected my mother. And it never has, not even in college.</p>
<p>When I questioned my father why he was so anti-alcohol he said it stemmed from his time in the Navy during WWII. He said he saw others drink to such excess on shore leave and make so many bad decisions, that he never wanted any part of it.</p>
<p>I know this thread is about drinking, but when I was in college there was very heavy pot usage, probably more common on a daily basis than alcohol- students who would take a couple bong hits and go to classes, the library, whatever. On Fridays groups of people would meet under the bell tower to light up. It was almost like there were different types of partiers- the frats went for drinking, the “intellectuals” or artists went for weed.</p>
<p>I was a heavy drinker (in mini’s terminology) much of my freshman and sophmore years of college, and a binge drinker from the middle of high school through the first year of law school. Some drugs, too, but alcohol was always my favorite by a mile, and I actively disliked pot without booze. The city I grew up in had a very active bar culture (and a lightly enforced 18 drinking age). Weekends in high school, nobody had parties, but I could visit five or six bars (all within walking distance of my house and each other) and see three-quarters of my classmates.</p>
<p>I loved parties, but no one ever really mistook me for a party animal. I was a scholarly type who dabbled in crazy. Still . . . loud music, tipsy girls, dancing, flirting, people opening up to each other . . . I really enjoyed that. </p>
<p>My spouse, on the other hand, who attended the same college at the same time, probably averaged a glass of wine a week, and more than six or seven people in a room with alcohol was her definition of “hell”.</p>
<p>Not a stupid frat boy (one out of three, and the first two were sort of not present at my college) or an academic slacker (summa cum laude, PBK). Not an exploiter of women by choice, although sometimes maybe the alcohol overcame both parties’ judgment (as both had been sort of hoping it would), but with ultimate effects not much different from exploitation.</p>
<p>Takes me a month to get through a six-pack, now, and women exploit me.</p>
<p>I’m a sophomore in college right now and have yet to go to a party. I also have never had any alcohol of any kind, nor have I ever tried any drug.</p>
<p>I pride myself on not drinking and not doing drugs. My 21st birthday is in September and I will be having milk with my cake–the same beverage I’ve had every birthday since I turned one.</p>
<p>My interests are my anti-drug. I’ve been a computer guy since 1989 and I consider them a big part of how I have stayed sober for as long as I have lived. I also credit my love of shopping and driving. When I go to a baseball game, I go for the baseball–not the wildness in the stands. Baseball is very relaxing for me, not just to watch but also to play. I also have done a lot of woodworking to pass time. In the future, I hope to restore a vintage Oldsmobile 442 or Delta 88.</p>
<p>As far as family history, my grandparents don’t drink and my mom hasn’t had anything to drink since the 1970s. My uncle has wine now and then but that’s about it. Nobody in my family has ever done drugs–we are about as anti-hippie and anti-drug as you can find anywhere.</p>