To think, you don't send a 14yr old to a party with alcohol?

[christmasandcounting]

Why would people do this? Child has been invited to a party with other kids of the same age. All the parents are giving them booze to bring with them? WTH? Why would ppl do this? They are CHILDREN!

If you teach children that alcohol is dirty/naughty and ban children from places where adults drink, you just make them more determined to get their hands on drink without the skills of learning drink in moderation etc.

In my opinion fourteen year olds should be drinking the odd alcoholic drink with a meal with adult family and close adult family friends for this reason.

They should see adults drink sensibly and they should by taught what moderation is, back in the day when it was the norm for teenagers to sit at their local having the odd quiet beer which lasted hours gave them the chance to do this.

A house party full of underage teenagers getting wasted with alcohol given by parents not only sends the wrong message, it puts them at risk of all kinds of things that they are probably not mature enough to handle.

Alcohol is not the problem, it's not giving teenagers a safe environment to allow them to make reasonable choices relating to alcohol consumption that I think is the problem.

No way!

I let my daughter at that age.
She's now 18, lives with her bf and mainly doesn't drink on a night out.
She'll be here for three days after Christmas and has asked me to get her one bottle of bucks fizz!
I'll be drinking more than that.

My mum sent me to a party at 16 with alcohol.

All this stuff is a bit like rights of passage. Same with getting ears pierced which is a huge thing on here.

Personally I’d prefer my ds to be introduced to alcohol with his meal. But not at 14. He’s told me that when I’m his father’s country they let him drink watered down wine with his meal - I wasn’t particularly thrilled with this, but it hasn’t made him wasn’t more.

For me, 14 is too young to introduce them to binge drinking drinking.

I am the grand daughter of an alcoholic, when we hit 14 we were not protected from his issues any more, so we were very well aware of things he did to himself, my Nan and my mum and her brother. At around the same time we were allowed a very weak snowball at Christmas, later progressing to the very grown up drink of martini! By then my grand father had passed away. His son, my uncle had many issues with alcohol, he used it as an escape, I also think he was gay but would never admit it but mostly was damaged by his upbringing. Alcohol was never forbidden in our home, my sister and I could have a drink on a Saturday evening with my parents while watching a film. There is only really 3 drinks I like and I have never been falling down, blackout drunk, for some reason I am unable to physically. I now have 3 children of my own 31,30 and 25. The eldest is not a drinker at all, doesn’t like it or want it, both boys are drinkers but not daily and not heavily. When they started to go to parties I always supplied whatever they took, impressed on them that this was a position of trust, I also had them at home when they were drunk for the first time at about their eighteenth birthday so I could see how they behaved. Thankfully they are happy drunks, not falling over and wanting to fight the world drunks. Again I have made them both very aware of my grandfathers story and the father of a dear friend has been in rehab. I feel they have had a balanced education regarding alcohol, neither of them have had particularly easy lives but neither have they used booze as a prop.

yes you can stop them, as they are children

Good luck with that

I found it very easy to stop my teenagers drinking.

I didn’t provide them with alcohol and if they went to a party where alcohol was around I collected them and if they had been drinking they knew they wouldn’t be going to any more parties for a long time

Other mothers thought I was draconian as they took the “learning to drink” stance but several of them have now said that they wished they had taken my approach as their now late teens/early 20s children are making some really bad choices where alcohol is concerned

Dd learned to drive at 17 and works very long hours in clubs and managing events so is always surrounded by alcohol.
So she doesn’t have time to drink.

Ds is a couple of years behind. He has tried non alcoholic stuff. He hates the taste so I doubt he will drink.

Haven’t studies now shown that the later someone is introduced to alcohol the less likely they are of becoming problem drinkers.

I also find it surprising how many parents seem to encourage their kids to drink. Sort of in a "We did it at your age and had great fun so you should too" way. A friend of mine has been giving her 14 year old booze at home which i think is crazy. Personally I'm not going to give my kids the idea that they need to drink to have fun. I wish I'd drunk much less when I was young. Dd is 15 and luckily isn't going to parties yet and shows no sign in being interested in drinking. There's plenty of time to so all that when they are older. If it came up when she was 16 then I probably would but I never would at 14.

I found it very easy to stop my teenagers drinking

As did I.
I did not provide it and I did not give them opportunities to be out drinking.
Sending a 14 yr old off with alcohol is the laziest of parenting and a sign of things to come I'd say.

"they're all doing it" "they'd do it anyway" "it's a rite of passage" or all the other justifications and/or excuses people use aren't for us and it's worked out pretty well.

No, they don't go crazy if you you don't let them drink as children 🤣

ANd again I say My mother had the same thoughts as you....that went well. Didnt stop us doing it, just taught us to lie better.

I am not saying your kids drink/drank or didnt, but that if a kid wants to drink then they will and you thinking that you are preventing it is naive at best.

No, they don't go crazy if you you don't let them drink as children

As a pub manager of 20 years in many different types of place (pubs, restaurants, gastro pubs, clubs) I can assure you, that while some dont, most do. Ask anyone who has run a pub, or an off licence or worked an 18th party. The vast majority who get completely twatted are the ones who have no idea how to handle booze. There will always be the minority who's one single aim is to get black out blasted, just as there is when you are 30, 40, or 70, but most dont.

Thtat didnt make sense!

I meant that there will always be those who have experience of alcohol in a controlled enviroment, such as home, but will still hit it hard but ime they are the minority. Just as they are the minority in adults who have been drinking for years, but the ones who have been taught about alcohol are far less likely to get purposely arseholed.

I am with you OP. I think it's outrageous behaviour. My dd went to a party at 14 and unbeknownst to me alcohol was provided. I was fucking livid and always saw the parents as feckless halfwits.

Yeah, no. I'm not a person who feels like a good time has to involve alcohol, and I don't want my kids thinking that it does either.

I am not saying your kids drink/drank or didnt, but that if a kid wants to drink then they will and you thinking that you are preventing it is naive at best

I don’t think I was naive.
I knew exactly where my children were 24/7.

They were at school, coming home from school, (on the tube), at ECAs with me either watching or parked outside.
Saturdays and Sundays were taken up with ECAs, competitions or a Saturday job and they saw their friends at the ECAs and competitions.

I don’t think Dd or Ds ever hung about in a park.

Thats so sad.

Did they ever get 5 minutes to themselves?! A bit of freedom to find themselves and muck about with their mates? To bugger off for a few hours just to be young?

I find that genuinely heartbreaking.

All their friends were all involved with the activities and competitions so to them that was all about doing stuff with their friends

I have a 15yo, she has never had alcohol as far as I know. I do not buy it for her, she doesn’t yet go to wild parties, any parties she does go to I check that parents are present and there is no alcohol.

I’ll go against the grain and would rather if she is going to drink she does it behind my back, as there is no way I’ll be condoning it at her age. My parents condoned it, I was bought all sorts of drinks from age 13, All it told me was that they didn’t care if I drank, so I drank ridiculous amounts as there was no consequences, and got myself into some bad situations. I distinctly remember my mum finding a 2L bottle of “cola” in my room at about 15, that honest to god must have been 75% bourbon. She just laughed.

I’ve also read a lot in recent years about alcohol on the developing teenage brain, and will probably never buy alcohol for under 18s at all, ever.

My general parenting philosophy is to to the exact opposite of what my parents did. Because I didn’t turn out so great.

Yes, I imagine they will experiment and do it behind my back at some point. But there will be consequences and hopefully deterrents.

Did they have a choice about making other friends? Or spending time with friends that didnt participate in your approved activities, because I have to be honest, it doesnt sound like it.

I know you don't want them to drink alcohol, but they will, so Surely you would want then to do it in a controlled enviornment like some other parents house and not the park bench/swing

I has sips of my mum's wine when I was 5!

Letting them drink at home in a “controlled environment” won’t stop them drinking on a park bench with their friends if they want to. It’s naive to think it will.

My youngest teen is 14 and it's not normal or OK, and it wasn't in the '80's when I was a teen.

At 16, yes it's a thing although I don't send my teens to parties armed with booze and don't provide it for other people's children.

I don't give them cigarettes either.

I think they do it so they know what they are drinking...

Y’all are truly wild. No reason or need to provide a child with alcohol. Absolutely inappropriate and where I’m from, it is illegal and a felony child abuse among other things.

When I was about that age we had house parties around mine and friend’s houses. Our parents used to provide a limited number of shandy/hooch type drinks (about 1 each) We felt grown up but stopped at that. Surely tats better than drinking lots in a park?

There’s good arguments for both sides. But all the stories for either (I let me DD drink, it was never forbidden fruit and now she’s not fussed, I didn’t let her drink and so she never got a taste for it and now she’s for fussed) are specific experiences.

I’m not sure you can predict the results as it depends on such a vast amount of factors both nature and nurture that are out of the parents control.

My parents allowed me to do absolutely anything I wanted. I was going to night clubs at 13. While I enjoyed drinking, going out etc, I was incredibly responsible and never vomited from drinking or anything like that. I also went on to go to smug University, successful job, family etc etc

One of my siblings had same upbringing. Has a dreadfully addictive personality, had lots of spells of drinking or taking drugs too much in adult life. All Es at A level. Easily prone to depression. Drinks to excess most weeks.

I don’t think you can definitively say either way. There are so so many different factors that define us and our behaviour.