Now we've all gotten drunk. Fall down, sloppy, mess-making drunk. My first bad drinking experience involved vodka, straight up, in a garage during a thunderstorm. It ended badly. I had a couple of others, but not too many that included me puking my guts out. But it happens.
According to this article from Time magazine, it might happen less if you drink with your kids. But that's illegal, you say. The drinking age is 21. Well, yes, but not exactly. According to Time, "When Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act in 1984, it explicitly allowed kids to drink at home or in 'private clubs or establishments.' Similarly, under most state laws, it's legal for those under 21 to consume alcohol under certain conditions. Only six states, mostly rural ones, ban underage alcohol consumption completely."
This "have a drink with your kids" thing isn't a new idea. A recent Babble Bad Parent essay by Gretchen Roberts titled Booze Clues talks about the idea of making alcohol something commonplace rather than this big taboo thing, which only makes it more interesting. The Time Magazine article backs up this notion, quoting a paper from the 2004 Journal of Adolescent Health as saying, "Drinking with parents appears to have a protective effect on general drinking trends."
The problem, of course, is when "not uptight about alcohol" translates into "letting the kids get wasted in the basement with their friends." Drinking a glass of wine with dinner is very different from getting drunk. When I sat in that garage, swilling vodka straight from the bottle, it was partly about the alcohol but also partly about being young and stupid. (I'm not condoning it or calling it a "right of passage", nor am I saying it was a sin worthy of caning. Just being honest.) Drinking until you, ahem, hurl, is something that you should only do when you're young and stupid. The other time I got sick from drinking was in college and again, I drank too much and I paid the price. There were other people that I went to school with who got that wasted on a regular basis.
So should you drink with your kids? I don't know. Personally, I don't think kids need wine any more than they need soda. That doesn't mean that we present alcohol (or soda) as something off-limits and exciting. Neither is a particularly big deal in our house, and different people have different rules. As with so many things, behavior that a reasonable person can handle (letting kids have a sip of wine every now and then) can become something else entirely in the hands of an irresponsible moron (hosting a kegger at home.)
Do you think that letting your kids in on the drinking at home will make them more or less likely to overdo it with liquor someday?
image: Addiction Inbox
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