My paternal grandfather was raised in Italy where wine was the drink with meals. When we were growing up we would sometimes have Sunday dinner at his house and he would pour each of us kids a small cup of wine. My mom then ran around the table topping off the wine with 7 up.
Years later Bartles and James came out with wine coolers. Too bad we didn’t market the idea first.
I don’t feel it’s my place to serve alcohol to anyone under the legal drinking age and never offer it to anyone (other than our own kids to have a taste if interested). When we had underage guests, we would only offer alcohol to folks of our generation or older.
It’s one thing to offer alcohol to your kids but I would be very cautious with offering it to other underage people. You could get into a lot of legal trouble because of it. A couple of years ago in my county a man was arrested for this very reason and had to serve jail time.
DH and I are very light drinkers, so my kids don’t have a daily (or weekly or probably monthly) exposure to adult drinkers. We will occasionally have beer or ale in the house and drink wine during holiday dinners with the extended family. As for offering alcohol to anyone under the legal drinking age - well, my nieces and nephews were offered wine during these holiday dinners when they were underaged. I know my brother offered my daughter a taste of sake (she really didn’t like the taste). I never thought to serve alcohol to underaged non-relatives. We just don’t have alcohol regularly and have it with our meals enough for this to be an issue.
I come from a family where appreciation and knowledge of good food and wine is valued and considered important. So, during my daughter’s late teen years, I felt that teaching her about wine and food was a part of conveying basic cultural literacy. Those few sips of wine here and there came with the price of a lecture, so I’m not sure how enjoyable they were. But she knows the basics of different grapes, winemaking regions in France and California, basics of wine and food pairing, etc., and she’s still underage.
She will be turning 21 soon. As one of her birthday gifts, I’m offering a high quality wine appreciation course. I’m hoping she’ll take me up in the offer because I feel it is useful and valuable information that can enhance one’s enjoyment of life.
Unfortunately my S used alcohol and weed as part of his teenage rebellion which manifested in late curfews and lack of parental respect and it caused much turmoil in our house, enough so that he moved out at age 18 but four months before high school graduation (he did finish and moved back in for the summer before going off to boot camp). Note to self: Never say “if you don’t want to live by my rules, don’t let the door hit you on the way out”, some kids take you up on it lol. I’ve offered D sips and she very occasionally will try something but has decided for the moment that she doesn’t like anything she’s tried. I’m not surprised, I doubt she’d enjoy any loss of inhibitions or control and after seeing some of the crap happening at college this past year becomes more adamant that alcohol and weed just aren’t in her future. I have no problem with kids learning moderation at home before going off on their own but that just wasn’t reality in our house.
I try not to judge other people and what they do with their kids, but…
We were at a multiple day gathering recently where one mom would pour a drink for her daughter automatically as she was having some, and one son drank much more than I would be comfortable letting my kids drink -I’m estimating well over a six pack each night. I smiled and nodded, but I did not think it was appropriate.
I wonder if they’re having this conversation in Colorado, but instead of wine it’s weed…
I can promise you weed is happening in more places than CO, WA, and DC.
No doubt, but I think CO is the place where it’s the most legal? I don’t know if the same rules apply to weed as alcohol regarding minors in CO. It’s an interesting question as to how people feel about one drug vs another when it comes to their (and other’s ) kids.
I think it is happening. Weed isn’t seen by many as that big of a deal, although not legal in most states. That’s why the tide is turning towards legalization, first for medical purposes and then for recreational use. In the scheme of things, it is a lot less dangerous of a substance than many things out there, including alcohol, I would argue.
I don’t use it but have no issue with others using it responsibly and in moderation.
I think I’d like to see more long term studies on its safety, especially with regards to smoking it (there’s no way that can be good for your lungs). If in 20 years when I retire I can buy pot brownies at the retirement center, I just might try one (and then make the evening news as I run naked downtown with a paranoid reaction). But I can’t ever see offering it to someone else’s kid (same with alcohol).
I do have clear memories of being at a neighbor’s house when I was around 5 and being handed a beer to drink at a barbecue. My parents were not there (I had wandered over). I thought it smelled like old horse feed. (still do). My adult self considers that behavior on the neighbor’s behalf to be very not ok.
Driving under the influence of impaired is illegal everywhere, I believe. Many people don’t consider how impaired they can be by Rx, OTC meds and/or pot. There’s a lot of talk about drunk or intoxicated driving–the others not so much, tho driver is still impaired and dangerous!
Allowing my 20 year old to drink a glass of wine in my home is just as legal as a 21 year old having a drink in a bar with their legal aged friends in my state. Parents often state “well, I teach my kids to obey the law.” In my state, allowing my child to drink a glass of wine as long as I’m present IS teaching them that we obey the law. When we visited D1 in NC before she was 21, we did not allow her to drink in our presence because the law doesn’t allow that.
My youngest is 22, but you get the gist.
The beer/wine drinking age was 16 when I was in HS (since raised to 18), so my parents’ rules for the house were quite similar to @doschicos.
Wasn’t really an issue growing up as my immediate family rarely kept alcohol in the house due to financial constraints and the fact the parents didn’t really drink.
However, since my father was on his own from the age of 12 due to war and being a refugee fleeing the Chinese Civil War in the late '40s, he did feel it was important to have me try a bit of alcohol when I was around 11 as he felt it was important for me to know the taste and learn its effects.
Granted, it was a bit of Tsingtao diluted with about 70% 7-up. Incidentally, 11 was also the age my parents stopped imposing a curfew.
Unlike many of my well-off suburbanite older cousins who grew up in towns where alcohol was considered an alluring forbidden fruit among HS/college aged students, I never got the allure nor did I get what was so appealing about “drinking to get drunk” among some of their neighbors and one particular older cousin who had a serious issues with beer/partying during his undergrad years.
Quite frankly, even as an elementary/middle school kid my mind was like “What’s the big deal?” and regarding “drinking to get drunk”…I was thinking “Why would I want to do something so idiotic…and cost me some money to boot?!!”
Granted, a large part of that was growing up in what was a working-class NYC neighborhood heavily populated with groups of homeless addicted to alcohol and/or drugs*. Their presence along with the need for the adults supervising my little-league softball league to do a comprehensive sweep of the local part for beer/liquor bottles, crack vials, heroin needles, etc was a great way to make alcohol consumption…especially heavy alcohol consumption quite unappealing and the complete opposite of glamorous or “cool”.
It was so effective I only started to drink socially a few years after college and while I’ve experienced an occasional buzz, had never experienced being drunk.
Just never allowed myself to drink enough to get to that point…and I always made it a point to eat a full meal before drinking.
Growing up, liquor in my household was no big deal, if we wanted to have wine or beer with dinner we could by the time we hit our mid to late teens, but we didn’t do it much. It used to be many states allowed an underage person to drink in a restaurant, NY used to for example, but after they raised it to 21 a lot of states got rid of that.
My state is one of 29 that allows underage drinking in private, as long as the parent is aware of it (10 allow it in a restaurant or whatnot with parental consent-them buying it). My son when younger tried wine (few kids like beer), but never really showed much interest in it, in part because neither my wife nor I are big drinkers,a glass of wine with dinner occassionally or a beer with dinner is about the extent of it, occassionally we might have something like a margarita. Once my son hit about 16 or so he occassionally would have wine with dinner with us (still doesn’t like beer), and never seemed to get into the binge drinking thing, nor did we exactly show him that either.
As far as kids associating drinking with socializing, I think a lot of that comes from the parents, not whether they drank underage. Growing up, a lot of the times the kids I saw go nuts with booze in high school were those who faced massive congitive dissonance, where the parents were of the ‘demon rum’ mentality towards alchohol with kids drinking it, but themselves when they entertained or went to parties, shall we say imbibed, it is how kids ‘catch’ the idea of drinking and socializing I suspect. I think that may explain why kids in Germany and other places where you can have beer or wine by your teens, may not be necessarily responsible drinkers, it could be the causality is what they catch at home so to speak and other factors.
The reason the drinking age was pushed back was not because of physiological differences, it was done primarily to keep booze away from teens. When the drinking age was 18, there were plenty of kids in high school who could legally buy booze and were doing so for their buddies, the other reason was that teens 18-21 had a drunk driving rate and accident rate/fatality rate that was much, much higher than 21 and over, so the federal government basically forced states into the 21 drinking age (basically, if a state kept the drinking age at any other age other than 21 or above, they would lose highway funds).
I would not serve underage kids even if I knew their parents were okay with it, unless the parents were there. Not just for legal reasons, but also because my choices for myself and my family are mine, and I think that is something their parents should decide and govern.
My personal take on alcohol is that we have this weird relationship with it, that like most things human tends to bring out the emotional arguments and so forth. We have those to whom drinking is a big deal (sort of roughly analagous to certain part of the gun owner community) and think anyone expressing concerns about alcohol must necessarily be the modern equivalent of Carrie Nation,and try and cite statistics that kids ‘learn to drink responsibly’ and so forth. On the other side, there are people, often for very real reasons (alcholism in the family or personal) who take the opposite pole, that alcohol is something that needs to be stamped out, that it is the enemy and so forth, they will cite study after study ‘proving’ the ills of alcohol (especially with people under 21), to the point I have had people compare it to smoking, which is absolutely off the deep end for any number of reasons (among other things, a kid having a glass of wine with dinner occassionally, or a younger kid have wine mixed with water or seltzer, which is still common in Europe, is not going to hurt them and may be beneficial in some ways, whereas with smoking, forget it).
Like I said above, I think alcohol and underage kids has to be a personal decision. Based on my own experiences with it, based on history to a certain extent, I don’t think there is any harm from kids having wine or beer occassionally (note I am talking irregular, light drinking), and I think things like binge drinking and kids going crazy with booze might be influenced by having access at home, but as a reason to let underage kids drink it is as flimsy as the Carrie nation approach . I think it is much like sex, that there are a lot of taboos around drinking, a lot of things that come out of emtions rather than logic (want an example? My wife went to the liquor store when my son was young, my dad was visiting, and she was buying beer and a couple of other things. My son was about 3 or 4, and while they were in the store my son reached up and was helping push the cart, like kids love to do. The guy who owned the store had a fit, said he could be fined if an inspector happened to be in the store, that the liquor laws were such that a kid couldn’t even be perceived to be involved with alcohol (a lawyer friend of mine, who worked with establishments with liquor licenses, confirmed that, it is the same way that these days if you have kids, they cannot sit at the bar, even if the place has food and the kid obviously is not drinking…which smacks of the ‘demon liquor’, rather than being about protecting kids.
@cobrat: Tsingtao and 7-up? That would be enough alone to dissuade someone from drinking, that combination just doesn’t seem great (I like tsintao, and while it often tastes more like wine than beer, still not a great mix:).
My parents are strict teetotalers. I doubt that alcohol has ever touched their lips. The same was expected of me. So when I hit 18, the legal drinking age back then, I couldn’t wait to drink! Definitely “forbidden fruit.” That’s why we offer beer or wine occasionally to our 18-year-old. We NEVER offer it to other kids. Our daughter’s friend from Germany stayed with us last year, and celebrated her 18th birthday while here. She could have had a drink to celebrate back home, but we told her she couldn’t have any at our house, because we could be prosecuted if caught.
Did not allow as it’s illegal.