<p>Looking through the paper this morning I stumbled over:
Okay - we’re all (well almost all) against parents serving alcohol to minors— party, parents, alcohol, pool - yeah, we’re against that. It’s a valid and noble goal. I’d sign that petition - wouldn’t you? But let’s get some details, okay?
Hey -wait a minute. Now we’ve got teenagers, including Ms. Grimes’ little girl, apparently stealing the parent’s beer after the folks are asleep. It’s not being “served” to them, but they sure are “consuming” it, aren’t they? So naturally, we’re outraged- not at Ms. Grime’s saintly daughter, who only had a “few sips” of beer before demurely retiring to watch TV :rolleyes: but the homeowners who hosted a party which was (as far as I can tell) perfectly responsible until the adults went to bed. Since there were more than two kids involved, the homeowners are now supposed to get hit with fines and community service or “alcohol education”? But it gets even clearer a few more paragraphs in:
Oh, but wait - it's not about trying to blame somebody else for our own darling's itsy-bitsy missteps -- oh, no, it's about *protecting the children.*
Here’s a suggestion for some extra steps to take: (1) Tell your daughter not to steal beer from her classmate’s parents and drink it. In fact, teach her not to drink it even if it wasn’t stolen. (2) Teach her to take responsibility for her own actions and accept the punishment which flows from it instead of blaming others. (3) Don’t cloak your own desire to lash out at others for the consequences of the misbehavior of your little darling in an aura of an abstract, noble cause.</p>
<p>The Little League thing relates to a different thread. </p>
<p>We really don’t want to go there again.</p>
<p>About this situation- I posted a similar scenario a while back, where I found out that a group of kids at our house :eek: were secretly drinking in our driveway, or somewhere on our property, during a party that had occurred the weekend before at our house. They had not, however, obtained the alcohol from our house. I was concerned about liability if this were to ever happen again (nothing bad happened as a result, THANK GOODNESS). My son told me later.</p>
<p>I felt like I was being flamed, and my son too, for not DOING SOMETHING then and there. Or not calling parents, tattletelling, getting everyone in trouble, etc.
CALL THE COPS!!!</p>
<p>Sometimes there really should be some blame put on the, ahem, 16-17-18 year old kids. They are, after all, not so young that they don’t know what they’re doing. (How’d they get the hooch to begin with??)</p>
<p>They’re a lot more savvy than we give them credit for.</p>
<p>But really, parents went to bed, teacher went to bed, daughter went inside to watch TV…a cooler on the patio conveniently filled with drinks? Perhaps the party should have ended when the hosts/adults all “left” it?</p>
<p>Doubleplay - you’ve got a point. If there’s a party at your house, and other kids find out about it (hey - cell phones, anyone? Of course they find out about it!) you will find yourself turning away uninvited guests. And chances are, the uninvited guests will be the ones who will be sneaking a few tallboys in the back seat while they’re hanging out in your neighborhood figuring out where to go next. And it will be your fault when that happens. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.</p>
<p>Sax,
There’s something more to the depravity expressed by those kids than mere alcohol excess. They’re really sick, c’mon…pooing on a piano??? ejaculating on stuffed animals??? This is way deeper than your ordinary run of the mill kegger.</p>
Well, what a relief to find that the OP asserts that self-serving, faux noble behavior is strictly a female (mom) trait!!! Pretty convenient <em>rofl</em> :rolleyes:</p>
<p>At least we only have to worry about half of the population. WHEW. Thank goodness! If males could demonstrate such deplorable traits, there might be a Nifong whose faux “good intentions” result in the travesty of something like the Duke LAX scandal!! Oh!!!..wait… ;)</p>
<p>Pretty surprised that this astute group let sexist tripe slide… :D</p>
<p>Note to kluge…you might want to avoid socialist countries when you retire. It’s Little League Mentality gone mad.</p>
<p>btw…I think the Little League syndrome is a boomer phenomena. I amsure the world will rest easier when our generation of control freaks passes on to the heavens, aka the lands of zero control.</p>
<p>Doubleplay - it’s absolutely true that other youth sports are just as bad (girl’s soccer - possibly even worse) But Little League is where I first observed the phenomenon. Berurah - I’m sorry I don’t meet your standards of Political Correctness. It’s a behavior that is certainly not unique to the fair sex. But moms in Little League is where I saw it first, so that’s how I think of it. And this one was a mom, after all.</p>
<p>“Youth Sports Parent Syndrome” just doesn’t have the same ring, does it?</p>
<p>Cheers - yes, it is definitely a Boomer phenomenon, like “helicopter parents” and a lot of other distasteful modern developments which are basically good impulses gone wrong through excess. The problem is that our generation is just really good at convincing ourselves that wacky behavior is perfectly justifiable under some logical yet irrational form of reasoning.</p>
<p>Oh - and here’s something new: the text of the petition is online:
Hey - who wouldn’t sign that? On the other hand, would you think it would apply to you if your kid’s friends stole your beer while you were asleep? Gotta love the petitioneers.</p>
<p>Honestly, the people whose parents have the strongest reactions to this are the SAME kids who are the ones getting drunk at these parties. I’m not saying parents should encourage it. I really don’t think parents should provide alcohol. But you know it’s always the people who can’t tell their parents because they’ll flip out and ground them for life and not let them go to college next year who were drinking. And the people who weren’t know their parents probably wouldn’t be happy about it, but aren’t going to die over it. I don’t drink but I feel like if I did I would tell my parents anyway, at least my mom. But the thing is, drinking has absolutely no appeal to me whatsoever. I know people who aren’t exactly rebelling openly, but in a way they have really closed lines of communications with their parents because they fear their parents will react unreasonably and hate them forever and disown them. Which probably isn’t true at all, but that’s how they feel. No parent should be happy about this or supporting it for sure, but it seems like it’s a deeper issue than just what the parent told them about underage drinking. They want to do it because they want to prove to themselves they’re in control over their parents, but like I said it’s not rebelling openly because they try to hide it. They aren’t trying to show their parents they’re in control (not quite that bold), just themselves. </p>
<p>On the other hand, it seems to me like the parents trying to “friends” by providing alcohol also have a lot of issues in their parent/child relationship in a lot of cases. Around here we seem to have a lot of this and it is the classic two parents working long hours at stressful jobs, when their kids are young they give presents to try to make up for time and sort of let their kids act how they want around them because they are too tired to deal with and don’t want to ruin the time they have together. When their kids get older, they try to win their favor by being cool and hip and having alcohol, making excuses like “it’s better they do it here”. This isn’t all that helpful to kids either, they seem sort of lost and tend to not really believe so strongly in the “friendship” as the parent does (although they’ll take advantage of it for alcohol or whatever else). In a way you get the sense they wish their parents would just be normal and say no because then they would have an excuse for the situations they aren’t comfortable with. But when your parents make it know they are just like another teenager, you never really have that excuse and they feel compelled to live up to the carefree, I’m such a rebel persona.</p>
<p>An update to the original story that didn’t appear in my edition of the local paper:
Okay - now we’re going to sue the school district because darling daughter stole beer from her friends’ parents at a school band get-together, got caught, and then got suspended from school for a few days. Oh, my.</p>
<p>But of course, this is all a high minded exercise in improving the world for the children. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>The next thing you know, we’ll be putting locks on our refrigerators (if they contain beer or wine products) or else…subject ourselves to the liability of someone snagging some of our hooch on the sly.</p>
<p>This reminds me of an incident that occurred a few months ago…</p>
<p>Son goes out in the garage, which is open (nice spring night); it’s dark; we have a garage frig containing drinks- soft drinks, wine, beer.</p>
<p>He confronts an intruder in the darkness of the garage. Intruder runs out toward street, son chases him into driveway, sees he is a kid and spots the vehicle (Rav something or other).</p>
<p>Son comes in, I call 911 but can’t ID the vehicle license. Son and I hop into car and cruise around, because he’s sure it was a couple kids.</p>
<p>We end up finding the truck in a nearby parking lot. We walk up to truck and confront the kids, give them a little bit of a hard time, threaten them about the cops, walk away (take the license).</p>
<p>Meanwhile, back in our neighborhood a cop is patrolling based on our 911 call, and we see him, tell him about our confrontation, give him the license. </p>
<p>He comes back 3 hours later, tells us he found the teens, they confessed about “breaking into” our garage. They were “Looking for Beer”.</p>