Does your 15-year-old teen drink socially?

[Shallowhallowpool]

DC is Year 10. Doing well at school. Does lots of team sports. An age appropriate pain in the butt, but overall great kid.

This academic year he's also started going out a lot more. Hanging with a big group. Parties. Parks. people's houses.

I know he drinks - he tells us - when he goes to parties or hangouts. He comes home mostly and he's not drunk. He says he has a couple of beers - but that they all drink. It's not all the time - at all. Every few weeks?

He swears he doesn't vape - he likes his sports too much - and I know he's tried weed because it didn't agree with him.

I guess my question is - how many Year 10 students drink socially? I try to be quite firm with boundaries, but also open so he'll talk to us about stuff. Just curious about others.

Maybe it's different in Australia - healthier but IME top grades at 18 for A levels have been achieved in spite of drinking and the dreaded vaping.

@Classiclines
You are very rigid and judgemental views, drinking as teen isn’t a failure as a parent, teenagers get freedom and they will try things, the controlling parents usually end up with their kids going wild at uni.

Are you always so judgemental?

I had a chat with my parents and said that them trying to be completely tee total did make me drink more at uni. I drank excessively, threw up my first few times and got horribly drunk in Freshers week.

However as I went through uni at some point I stopped enjoying it. Waking up hungover with mass hangxiety and being embarrassed about the night before. I don't even enjoy it anymore.

I never smoked because I didn't want cancer. I never did hard drugs because I was terrified of death.

There was one girl I knew at school who honestly had no ambition and just drank in her free time. Had very liberal parents. She only did 2 A-levels, didn't go uni, did hospitality and now I have no clue what she does.

I'd want to know where the booze is coming from.

It must be so difficult to obtain booze when underage these days that the regularity of it (not to mention the cost!) would have me questioning who is providing it.

Not to suggest anything sinister per se but as an adult with younger teens I couldn't imagine providing alcohol for my DS and his mates.

There will always be older brothers or sisters, 16 year olds who look older, unscrupulous off licence, parents who host a party and lay on some ciders or pre mixed cans, I don’t think it’s any more difficult than it’s ever been tbh.

I can't guarantee that my 15yo does not acquire and consume alcohol when she's not under my supervision, but I don't provide it to her to take out, and I don't allow her friends to consume alcohol in my house. I wouldn't go ballistic if she did, but I don't think it's desirable and have no wish to facilitate it (adolescent brain plasticity and all that jazz).

I think whatever I did or didn't get up to at her age is of no relevance whatsoever, and more importantly the whole controlled exposure/forbidden fruit myth has been largely debunked. Later onset of alcohol use is more closely associated with healthy and responsible drinking patterns.

"Shop drop" - apparently, if I've remembered the name correctly. Randoms buying them booze at shops

It's really, really not hard to get anything underage. The number of kids who are able to purchase weed vapes online is astonishing, for example. There was a whole thing about it a few months ago

This is so true. They need to learn their limits in a safe environment. My 16 year old now just sticks to a few beers after mixing his drinks and being sick a while ago. We’ve always had an open conversation about alcohol and he now knows how awful he feels if he over-does it. He gets good grades, goes to the gym, plays team sports. But does also like to socialise with friends.

17 year old DS doesn’t drink much at all now. He figured it out for himself. I don’t think banning it would have helped him come to this conclusion.

I don't buy it and would never buy it for DC and friends. They had about 12 friends around last weekend for a few hours whilst we were out. Got back the time I said everyone had to be out by. DC was alone, tidying up. House Looked completely fine - but apparently a lot had been drunk. So I guess they bought their own booze, which I obviously can't control. Door slamming and noise was a bigger issue that night (for my neighbours)

I provide DS with a few cans of beer. I’m bemused at those that don’t do that and leave them to ask randoms to buy from a shop or try to procure it some other way….

I never did at 15 simply because it wasn't part of family. I only started because others would talk about how drunk they got at parties.

Plenty of small independent shops will still sell to minors, just like they sell vapes to them.

My eldest as part of his voluntary work as a teen used to be involved in “mystery shopper” type exercises for a few different organisations and while the bigger supermarket type places were strict, they’d almost always be sold something they shouldn’t have been allowed elsewhere. The teens tend to know through word of mouth where they can go locally and be served, sending the tallest person in etc.

We/parents would be foolish to believe that the world operates with respect for legality in this area

In America no 15 year old is drinking socially

Not sure we want to emulate anything about America at the moment. I mean they may not be drinking socially but they could get shot at school…

Let me just check with my American friends about that......

All 3 of my boys started drinking about 15. Two still drink quite a bit (in their 20s) and one is a teetotal now, through choice. I honestly don't see it as anything that terrible! They all have great careers, girlfriends and loads of mates and brilliant solial lives. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Please back that up with non anecdotal evidence, as I find it an impossible/ludicrous statement.

My 18 year old drinks when he goes out, he didn't at 15 and he was never into hanging out in parks (so maybe that's why).
I let him have the odd beer on holiday at 17, but I think 15 is far too young.

My DD did and friends kids did too- so did I

This isn't a good argument. A complete non-sequitur and irrelevant.

If I was talking about start up funding and scale up culture being better would you be like "oh but school shooting, oh but trump"

Brutally honest, for a US schoolchild, the chance of dying in a school shooting in a given year is extremely low — on the order of about 1 in several million per year, not 1 in thousands or even 1 in hundreds of thousands.

I don’t know if anyone has heard of Scott Galloway on here but he has an interesting take on drinking in the young.

He basically argues that with all the issues with social isolation/screen time addiction/ gaming etc that going out and having a few beers is not an issue and the social benefits are huge. Especially with a young liver that can cope with it.

Drinking age in USA is 21. Many states even ban underage consumption as well. Here you can drink at 5. In the USA you can't even drink "at home with parents".