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| At home | 53% | 627 votes | Total: 1176 votes | |
| No-use | 47% | 549 votes |
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Add to FavoritesI find this question to be more about how we teach our children to make responsible, independent choices, than it is about drinking alcohol,specifically . How they choose to drink alcohol responsibly, or smoke cigarettes or weed, or drive defensively, or respect curfews, or address any other challenges they may experience, are all derived from the same values system. I believe that if this question is addressed only when the children are old enough to drink alcohol, it is already too late to expect responsible decisions from them.
By teaching our children, at an early age, to make wise choices based on consequences, when the time comes for them to make decisions about alcohol, smoking, driving, curfews, etc. they will have a lot of experiences from which to draw, in order to make responsible choices. Have your children learned to make their own lunches, do their own laundry, make their own beds, take out the garbage, etc.? Are your children expected to do chores in order to earn their allowances?
When children have been exposed, from an early age, to making responsible choices and have received praise for responsible choices, they come to understand the difference between good and bad decisions, and drinking alcohol responsibly becomes a moot point.
In our house, our children were started off with a full "trust account". That is, they knew that we trusted them to make wise, informed, responsible choices. They received positive reinforcement for their good choices and their trust accounts remained full unless/until they made a decision that resulted in a "withdrawal" from their trust account. The level of withdrawal directly related to the choice/decision. No choice was ever so wrong that the trust account could not be refilled.
Imagine if our school systems started each student off with an "A", and children worked to keep their "A", or had opportunities to recover their "A" if they made a mistake? Imagine what that perspective would do to our children's self esteem!
In our house, our message to our children (who are now grown, with children of their own) was that everyone makes occasional mistakes/wrong choices (including us,their parents). None of us is perfect, and it is through our mistakes that we learn and grow,as long as we find the lessons and try not to repeat our mistakes. They knew that our love and support for them was unconditional. Having said that, they also knew that their choices and actions had consequences, and that negative decisions/actions would have negative consequences. We would ask them what their "punishment" ought to be, and they were often harder on themselves than we would have been!
Our home was always filled with our kid's friends. We treated their friends with the same degree of respect and trust and the same messages that we gave to our own children. As they got older, and alcohol became an issue, our message was always - "we hope that you and your friends will make good choices and not drink when you're underage. When you are of age, we hope that you will drink responsibly and never drive if you have been drinking". That's not to say that we ever encouraged or allowed under-age drinking, however, if it happened, their safety was our first priority.
When at our house, if anyone had been drinking, they handed in their keys and crashed at our house. Many of them crashed anyway, even if they hadn't been drinking, because they knew we served wicked brunches on the weekend. With brunch, they always received praise for their choice to stay in a safe place until they were sober.
When partying elsewhere, our message to our kids and their friends was always the same - "if you've been drinking and need a ride home, call us, no matter what the hour or the situation. We will come and get you and bring you home with us. No questions, no judgments - we just want you to be safe". We would get calls from our kids' friends, even when our kids weren't with them. They knew they had a safe place to go. They also knew that the next day, they would be having a discussion with us about responsible choices, and that they would be making withdrawals from the trust account with us. They also knew that by taking lessons from the experience and making better choices in the future, they could build up their trust account once more.
We always urged our kids' friends to be open and honest with their parents, because we had no desire to enable behaviour their parents would not endorse. We always encouraged them to contact their parents and update them on where they were and what they were doing, and it was amazing to us how many parents were not at home or were disinterested in where their kids were or what they were doing.
Even though I was a stay-at-home mom until both our kids were in high school, our kids would make their own breakfasts, or pack their own lunches, or come home to an empty house (they didn't know it, but I would park around the corner, to ensure that they did what they had been taught to do if they arrived home before me). That consistent trust, and our belief in their ability to make good choices gave them a solid foundation for meeting and handling difficult issues like peer pressure, drinking alcohol responsibly, and other responsible decision-making challenges.
I'll never forget, when my daughter went to University, her telling us that the students who had never experienced independence and responsibility at home were very obvious. They were the ones that went wild with new-found freedom and no restrictions or accountability. They partied into oblivion and with no self-discipline whatsoever. They were the ones who flunked out early in the school year, because they had had no prior experience with freedom and responsible decision-making.
Does that mean I believe our kids never got drunk or got high or drove irresponsibly or broke our rules? I think probably they did at some time or another - who among us has never experimented with enticing forbidden fruits? We were all young once, and we remember that we learned from experience, probably more than we did from rules, lectures, expectations and punishments.
What I know to be true is that forbidden fruits are always the most intriguing. And, the more intrigue and mystery that surrounds a forbidden activity, the more curiosity it evokes. And, curiosity almost always leads to action - action that might be forbidden, yet is so enticing it cannot be ignored. For those who have not learned how to make values-driven choices, their actions can have serious concequences.
Childre n will not and cannot be angels. They seek their independence, yet are very susceptible to peer pressure and their greatest desire is to fit in with their friends and do what their friends do. For that reason, I think a no-use policy is, in the majority of cases, doomed to failure.
Learn more about this author, Nan Einarson.
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No-use
Children need boundaries. Children need structure. Children need credible information, and positive examples of responsible behavior, in order to later make good choices. Children DO NOT need experimentation, simply because in this day and age, the risks are too dangerous. First and foremost, it's important to clarify semantics. If there is, supposedly, a "responsible" way for children to consume alcohol, would this translate into teaching your child "casual drinking"? As far as I know drinking alcohol irresponsibly is called abuse. "No-use" is simply zero tolerance, in this case, for illegal activity. Bear in mind that a minor cannot purchase alcohol, and there's a reason for this. Alcohol is a drug. As adults, it is important that in an effort to show openness, friendliness and tolerance towards our children, we don't compromise ethics and morality, in the process.
Model healthy choices for your child. With a birds eye view, as a teacher in the public school system, and perhaps, more authoritatively, the daughter of an alcoholic parent, I contend that any adolescent who would drink liquor irresponsibly isn't doing so, because they are ignorant of a right or wrong way to do it. Peer pressure deems a teenager's fundamental family values, and in many cases, common sense, obsolete- null and void, anyway. If a parent's objective is educating a child on the perils of drinking too much, the parent has sabotaged his/her own agenda once the child consumes the first sip. One sip of any drug is too much, much like one puff of a blunt (dope, weed, chronic, marijuana). For medically sound reasons, even a drag off a cigarette could have profoundly adverse affects on a child, considering every child's neurological and physiological chemistry is different. These are foreign substances, or better said, DRUGS, we're discussing. These chemicals do not create a healthy, tolerant introduction to every person's body. Besides, if the child is tempted to go overboard to impress his/her social circle, this will be done with all deliberateness, because the agenda is not to be responsible for the sake of parental approval. The agenda, parents forget, is peer acceptance and applause; therefore, the more reckless and overly-indulgent, the "cooler," the better the teen becomes.
Should parents teach their kids how to smoke weed responsibly? For those that would draw a distinction between marijuana and gin, vodka, champagne, wine or tequila, I would argue this smacks of a bit of superiority. Drinkers, in an effort to justify their own indulgence, may imagine there's a hierarchy when it comes to partaking in a drink. There is a level for the casual, recreational drinker, the fine, formal occasional sipper, to the downright drunk. There's really no point. Whether you're drinking to get a buzz, or simply as a means of politeness and etiquette, the fact remains that your reasons for drinking don't change the product! Alcohol is a chemical, and your body will not fail to be affected by even the least amount introduced to it.
You cannot have a realistically intelligent conversation on discipline versus leniency with children and choices without factoring in hormones. Children, throughout their adolescence, right up through the extent of their teen years, are still undergoing brain growth and development. The arctic region of the brain, which is responsible for rationalizing long-term consequences, and foreseeing what adults refer to as "the big picture," has not reached its full growth potential; in other words, because it is the very last region, neurologically, to reach full maturity, there is, technically, no such thing as teaching a child how to drink, with boundaries. By the time the child is old enough to understand that they cannot purchase alcohol or cigarettes or other products that adults can, the child does have the cognitive ability to understand the reason for this, whether they like it, or agree with it. Once a child believes that a parent has failed to provide the safety and structure they so desperately need in order to see alternatives to their peer's choices, it is too late to rationalize the adult's means to an end. The lines have blurred and the child now perceives the parent as more "friend," and yes, tolerant. Unfortunately, these types of parents are rudely awakened when their kids consider them equals, first, and may even accuse them of being hypocrites, when Mom and Dad eventually try to pull the reigns in.
Long story short, let a kid be a kid, for heaven's sake. Teach your child to read. Teach your child to excel athletically, and eat nutritionally and responsibly to ward off hazards of obesity, one of the number one increasing epidemics within their age group. But, don't teach your kid how to drink; on the other hand, how about teaching our society's children to think? And unimpaired thinking is the safest way to make any choice, irregardless of the nature of it.
Home is where the heart is. Home is where we discover wholesomeness, or should. That is why so many adult children return, and continue to return, even with grandchildren. Once the world and all of its outside influences has it's way with us, home is where we find those foundational, core family values like love, loyalty, sound work ethics and clean living. In due time, children will grow into the imperfect adults they will inevitably become, as we all did. Whatever choices they make, contributing to those imperfections, are choices they have a right to, and realistically, can't avoid. Exposing your child to alcohol consumption is not an aboveboard parenting measure; to the contrary, educating your child about the benefits of eating and drinking for optimal health is more purposeful. Combining information of what is right along with what they could potentially be tempted with, is enough exposure for most kids. It is the taboo or "hush-hush" method that has a converse impact, and compels them, out of curiosity, to experiment with what they think they've been missing. But, there's not much to miss if your parents have an open, honest channel of communication in the household.
There is just "no-usefulness" in throwing caution to the wind. Generally, over the course of their lifetime, a kid will have a number of friends. This is not the case, having only two, or perhaps, just one... parent. A child should have at least one place he/she can go to get back to what is normal.
And none of us were born giving a toast, or with a can of beer in our hands.
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