Teenage party - rules?

[aliasjoey]

DD is hosting a party tomorrow we are going to have a dozen 16-17 year olds in our house DH and I are going to hide upstairs with the dogs and Netflix. Although I’ll have to let the dogs out at some point, but will try to keep my eyes closed.

What should we plan for? I’m thinking we say No Gatecrashers, No Drugs, No Smoking inside the house. There’s not much else we can do except give them the WiFi code and hide anything breakable.

DD is a pretty good girl and she says her friends are all okay... but DH remembers a party he had once, and his parents had to redecorate the kitchen. So he’s a bit twitchy.

Clear end of party time! Expectation that you will pop down a couple of times to check all ok. No spirits!

That’s a good idea about the time, some of them are staying over but the others could be out by... 12?

I wasn’t sure about whether to ban alcohol or not, maybe as you say - no spirits.

You could ban it entirely, and that would be totally reasonable. They are under the after all!
DD is 16, and has been to a few proper parties. Mostly we have sent her with a small bottle of cider, GCSE results night she had 2 bottles, and strict instructions not to drink anything else alcoholic. Party last weekend no one was allowed to take booze, the parents provided enough for them all to have one or 2 each, the parents wanted to control what the kids were drinking. Apart from one incident at home, our rules of providing a small amount at a party seem to have worked.

Midnight is fine for end time I think. I mostly pick up DD for 11, DS's 18th which we held at home was a 1am finish - and at 12.55 his mates all left, reasonably quietly! I did buy flowers for our neighbours, as the bass voices reverberate round the house somewhat!

Our rules are: No drugs. No under 16s drinking alcohol. All drinking only by prior permission of parents. No one goes home alone. They can sleep over or be picked up by parents/carers.
Proper food must be eaten (which means I got to hang out in the kitchen 'sorting pizzas' (checking no one was too drunk.)
It was pretty civilised and they all said they had a great time.
I bought a fair amount of zero alcohol lager and cider. Not sure they even noticed it wasn't the real thing. And I made prosecco cocktails with lots of fruit juice in.

I didn’t like to get too involved as DD really wanted us to not to show our faces, but we said no spirits. I saw a couple of cans of cider, and DD told us that someone brought vodka but that person isn’t staying the night (nice that DD felt able to tell us)

I did wonder about them getting home safely, I’m going to mention it when I take the dogs down. I can hear somebody playing a guitar, and someone else playing with a dog... other dog came upstairs as it was too noisy for him!