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Teach Your Kids How to Drink
I used to feel superior to moms whose teens drank behind their backs. Then my own children reached high school and I developed my own perfectly imperfect alcohol policy. Read an interview with Lee Woodruff about her new book, Perfectly Imperfect.
Let me just say right off the bat: If you don’t have teenagers, if you believe that your children will obey everything you say, and that your kids will never experiment with any illegal substances, tell a white lie, or throw a party while you aren’t home—this article is not for you. And before you get all sanctimonious on me, just remember the lessons of Sarah Palin’s stance on abstinence and her recent grandmotherhood. Humans are, well, fallible.
This article is for the people who are parenting teens and tweens who are wrestling with the issue of alcohol and how to ultimately teach our children to drink responsibly. All of us in these shoes are grappling with what, if anything, to allow, absolutely forbid, or turn a blind eye toward.
I told my kids I knew one of their friends kept a Facebook tally of how many times he and his girlfriend had sex. I like to toss out this kind of info just to reinforce my omniscience.
Teenage drinking is the hot topic among any group of red-blooded American parents. We face giant challenges today. When I grew up, the drinking age was 18. My own senior in high school is old enough to legally fight and kill a human being in Iraq, but too young to pop open a beer at home.
Admittedly, the whole issue of teens and drinking is scary when you meld reality with the irrationality of the teenage brain, or when you juxtapose human nature with the law. What should be clear-cut—kids under 21 can’t drink—is not so in practice. Our country’s puritanical roots, prohibitionist past, and attitude toward alcohol creates a subculture of fake IDs, sneaking around, and, as one mom said to me, “forcing kids and their cars further into the woods to drink.”
When my sister’s kids were in high school and attending parties years before mine, I remember feeling superior. “I won’t let my kids do that,” I thought, smirking. Funny the navigating and editing you do, the concessions you make, a little here, a little there, when you actually arrive at that fork in the road.
Kids learn from watching us. They are quiet sponges. In my new book, Perfectly Imperfect, I write about the sudden realization that my then-16-year-old son had grown into himself. Long before high school, his dad and I had already given him our best stuff.
What we show our kids about drinking (the simple glass of wine with dinner or the four-martini neighborhood barbecue where mom stumbles home with a broken heel for a boozy goodnight kiss) have been keenly observed lessons years earlier. Do what we say, not what we do.
I admire the European model of drinking. Kids are offered sips or a glass of wine now and then with the family at the dinner table. They have a shot at viewing alcohol in moderation, as something laced into life, not locked away until a certain age. As my older kids became curious, I gave them sips of drinks—relieved when they were mostly disgusted. And I have tried to treat drinking as anything but the “great forbidden.” But I’ve also been careful. I don’t think any of my children has ever seen me tipsy.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and senior government official, is author of Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins 2009), a book that shows how to think about and use power in the 21st century. He is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Going Rogue: The Index
Christopher Buckley's books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine. His new book is Losing Mum and Pup, a memoir. Buckley's Daily Beast column is the winner of an Online Journalism Award in the category of Online Commentary.
Let's Stop the Twitter Madness
Lee Woodruff is the life and family contributor for ABC’s Good Morning America and the author of In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing and Perfectly Imperfect.
That's a solid stance. Parents who choose to ignore the prospect of underage drinking are foolish at best and dangerous at worst.
I like this parent's columns more than the lady who lets her 13 year old run the streets of NYC.
I think lee and I were separated by birth. I have had the exact same conversations with my children.
I grew up like this; knowing I hated scotch and able to mix a beautiful dry whiskey cocktail by 16. That was the norm where I came from and so yes- we gave parties when the parents left town. And the guests helped clean up before they left. Nobady went nuts and wrecked peoples houses. Drunk driving crashes were so rare I didn't have a friend die in high school. And in college I was a two drink max girl who was always stuck holding sorority sisters heads and cleaning up vomit.
The tolerance of pot in the '70's had a similar effect. We didn't smoke it much and I can only think of one person of my generation who went to rehab. Ever. And I came from a large city but a very small town.
Nobodies parents gave them pot, but the whole idea of excess seemed silly in a place where you could get into bars at 16. No binge drinking, lots of ice in our cocktails, shooters were unheard of, and alcohol accompanied conversation, dancing, stargazing, and a lot of other simple pleasures not involving sex or emergency rooms.
I think movies showing bad behavior are a big problem. "Animal House" came out my senior year and so at college that was the model for behavior. Don't underestimate the power of media to set bad examples for your kids.
This is like "teach your teens how to f#@k" that the anti-abstinence crowd like to tell people to do. How about being a parent instead of trying to be their "friend"?!?!? I suspect you give your teens way too much freedom! If you think they will drink ILLEGALLY, then don't let them leave the house! If you think they are going to be having sex, then don't let them leave the house! It's a bad idea to wait until they are teens before you try to instill some kind of morality or ethics to them. Those "little sips" is also a very bad idea; that's how all those "parents" go to jail for teenage drinking parties in their homes!
TotalRecall9, you are saying foolish things. You've missed the point.
I was always able to sneak away when I wasn't supposed to leave the house.
I would climb out through the roof at night. Or during the day, I would manage to get home 5 mins before my parents got home, allowing me plenty of time to hang out with friends and make out with girls during the day. I also had a job, which allowed me another way to bend the clock to work in my favor. When things got too restrictive at home, I ran away for two weeks.
Wow! Nice bloated, alarmist hyperbole!
Here's a reality check for you: I was given "little sips" when I was a kid. The result: I don't drink, because most of those drinks taste nasty as hell when you are a kid! I grew up watching my parents drinking responsibly, as a result I look down on people who don't drink responsibly. Should I ever decide to take up drinking, I would do it with class and moderation, just like my parents! I was instilled with plenty of morality and ethics, thank you very much.
There is no such thing as an "anti-abstinence" crowd. There is, however, an "anti-abstinence only" crowd. Those of us who aren't myopic can plainly see it's best to encourage abstinence, but offer info on contraceptives and birth control just in case the kids change their minds.
Whether you like it or not, kids are going to be interested in sex and alcohol.
The best thing you can do is to remind them that they are not invincible and to teach moderation and encourage abstinence but also inform them of contraceptives. The more you hold something out of their reach, the more you increase their interest to reach for that "forbidden" fruit. They will drink and have sex, if not only out of curiosity, they will do it just to spite you.
I don't know if you have kids, but I remember kids who had parents like you and the result was almost always the same: their kids turned out to be the biggest alcoholics and STD-ridden sex freaks because they were never taught moderation or caution, they just grew up with rigid, puritanical, and provincial attitudes about sex and alcohol.
TotalRecall9, we don't really need to "teach kids how to fuck," it's a primal instinct. As for drinking goes, I can attest to being the son of parents who trusted in my maturity enough to drink--while being far from "friends" with them. When I was 15 my parents handed my the first drink (not that I'd ever had, but that they'd known about) and it allowed me to be more open with my parents about the things I did without feeling guilty for doing them. The fact that they accepted i could handle it, made me KNOW that i could handle it, and made me into a more responsible drinker.
The way I see it now from the perspective of a Midwestern college student, all parents should introduce their kids to alcohol at a young age. The majority of people here never drank before they got here, and they don't do it right. Binge drinking is the unwanted side affect of the lifestyle you purport. There's such a stigma on underage drinking that when a young adult is finally able to make the decision for themselves, they go overboard because they feel, after years of not being ALLOWED to, that they need to take full advantage of the opportunity. The concepts of responsibility, moderation, and social drinking are foreign to them because they've only learned their drinking habits from other children.
It's people like YOU that make sure we maintain the highest per-capita alcoholic rate, and it's people like YOU that need to have a little more TRUST in their CHILDREN to make the right choice--provided they've been properly informed.
This comment has been removed by The Daily Beast's editors.
My observations are, after more than twenty years working with teens and their families, that some teens will push the limits harder than others, but that all teens will at some point push the limits. Wise parents plan for this.
The hallmark of good parenting isn't a "line in the sand". It is a set of principles that one works very hard to instill in one's children. The details aren't as important as the foundations.
Lee Woodruff writes very realistically about the issues facing both parents and teens, and articulates an approach that works for her family. Others might take another approach, or deride her conclusions, but the bottom line is that loving one's child enough to want what is best for him or her without regard for the cost to oneself covers a lot of mistakes made in parenting. Ms. Woodruff clearly loves her children enough to make that effort.
Too bad kids don't come with personalized instruction manuals.
Let me start by telling you that I am 25 and I have a younger sister who is 20. I was raised in a very "European" household, alcohol was freely available most of my life but there were very decided rules on when drinking was appropriate. Family dinner was mandatory, all members of the family must be at the table for at least 30 minutes weather or not you wanted to eat anything, I trace a lot of the things I learned about life to these dinners. now my parents never drank to excess, I have never seen ether of them even tipsy, but they did always drink, for my mother there was always wine with dinner 2 glasses at most for my father 1-3 beers with dinner followed my a Bourbon or two after dinner, always on the rocks.
From when I was 10 or so I was offered wine with my dinner at fest it would be Heavily watered, with 3/4 water 1/4 wine as I got older there was less and less water until when I was 15 it was all wine, I could only have 1 glass until I was in my late teens. There was no drinking in daylight, and you should try to only drink when there is food involved, I in fact had my first drink while it was still light outside when I was 22 or 23, it's still something I think of when someone offers me a drink at lunch time.
To my sister and I drinking alcohol is a part of life and there is nothing forbidden about it, but drinking to excess or being irresponsible is a VERY bad idea. we were taught to respect alcohol, to enjoy it but to be very careful with it as well. and because of this nether one of use has ever seen the appeal of binge drinking.
as for drinking, my father told us that if you get a DUI when your underage then you can't get loans for college and if we ever got a DUI then he wouldn't be paying for our college, he said that we could drink as much as we wanted but if we ever drank even one beer and then got in a car we wouldn't be going to college (and we'd have to live at home forever), the at home forever part is what I think did it, we never got in a car drunk or in anyone else car that if they had been drinking. As for parties they felt that it was fine for guests at our parties to have a glass of wine or a beer if they weren't driving later, but that getting drunk in our home was disrespectful, so there was drinking but of a very adult responsible nature (my father loved to play bar tender at our high school BBQ's).
I will forever be thankful to my parents for teaching me that alcohol is okay but that it has a time and a place.
Oh, and TotalRecall9, do you know where your kids are and what they were doing last night?
"I read somewhere that a teetotaling celebrity was forced by his dad to down a whole six-pack in one sitting after he was caught drinking. Supposedly he never drank again."
this makes me think she doesn't know very much about drinking.
This is a great article that points up how little control parents have as kids make good and bad choices. Considering my teenage years, I have no high horse to ride. We're rural so removing access to a car is removing access to jobs, organized school activities and other positive parts of life. It really comes down to the pragmatics that drunk driving leads to really bad consequences like death.
We're rather liberal so is there an 'anti-military' academy for our kids?
I am a college student who was raised by a single mother who parenting towards alcohol was similar to the authors. My mom always kept wine in the house and allowed me to have one glass a night. On occasion I would have two and sleep great. She was very fearful of me drinking around friends at party's and becoming a sexual target. We made a promise that I wouldnt drink outside the house until I could handle two drinks with no problems. She taught me about eating with alcohol and the effects of stress and alcohol.
My freshman year, a large portion of my freshman class flunked out due to poor drinking habits. Many of them never encountered alcohol before. Now I watch as girlfriends regret shame sexual encounters with guys at parties because they were too waisted to make better decisions. I am not a parent but I am grateful that my mom taught me about drinking. I think I am going to call her and thank her right now.
this is all very nice and logical and fine, unless there is a history of addiction in the family system. we now know without a doubt, neurobiologically, that children whose parents, grandparents or great-grandparents had alcoholism or drug addiction are genetically at risk to be problem drinkers or chemically dependent. external controls may fail.
"I will ask if there is a designated driver. My son knows exactly what I am getting at"
You are giving your 16yo son tacit permission to get so drunk he cant drive?
I think you'd be better off letting them drink in your house, so you know there are no transportation issues and no inappropriate alcohol games that encourage over drinking.
"Our country's puritanical roots, prohibitionist past, and attitude toward alcohol creates..." Blah, blah blah, instead of blaming a religious group that hasnt been around since the 17th century you should be calling out the overly officious Mom baby boomers of MADD.
I'm another one whose mother gave her sips of her pre-dinner port (actually, she'd put a sip's worth in a shot glass, so I had my own glass); that ended when she gave up port for martinis (blech--the gin was so vile-smelling I had no desire to taste). And when I was in high school, if the family was having wine with dinner, I always had my own glass. It was no big deal. Then I hung out with a non-drinking crowd in college and I never missed it. Later on, I did my partying (as a full-on hair-band-Sunset-Strip denizen), but I was a full adult and when the partying days ended, i stopped drinking again. Nowadays, maybe I'll have a glass of wine on special occasions. It was never the forbidden fruit for me and it's never been a problem.
Thank you.
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