Re: Have you had a party/ What would you do?...
We've never had a proper teenage party. My daughter has only ever had girlie supper parties. DH and I have been in the house, they are all lovely girls who we know well. From the age of sixteen, we've served some sort of cocktail ("Champagne" cocktails or Pimms or whatever) then a nice supper (that DD has prepped with my help) with a glass of wine.
Personally, I'm not planning on having a typical teenage party at home, ever, if I can get away with it. Some of my friends have and it's always been a case of "never again". I'm happy with girlie suppers for the time being but very aware that her eighteenth is looming on the horizon - don't quite know what we're going to do for that. DD also doesn't feel she wants a big teenage bash. She says it's too much responsibility and that there are always people who are disrespectful to property, people who get completely smashed and throw up and then, the next week, the word goes out that unless so-and-so's party was "amaaaaaazing" then it was "really gaaaaaaaaaaaaay".
The other possibility though, is a very small get-together. Sometimes one of her lot has an "evening in" for, say, six (mixture of boys and girls) which involves a casual supper (chilli or pizza or lasagne or whatever), a couple of little beers for the boys, a couple of glasses of wine for the girls, parents somewhere in the background and they end up watching a DVD or playing cards or whatever and having a laugh. I'm happy for her to her have something like this.
Re: What sort of parties do I allow my daughter to go to?
My daughter is seventeen and has been going to teenage parties since she was fifteen. We either know the kid having the party or know of him/ her through friends of friends since they're all from school.
They do all seem to take some sort of alcohol with them so, since she was about sixteen I've compromised and let her take a couple of alcopops since I'd rather she drank them than be swigging from somebody else's bottle of God Knows What.
She's been drunk once. I had a phone-call from the party host's Dad to ask me to come and collect her because she had got drunk (interestingly, she didn't take anything of her own to drink to this party - she'd had swigs of other people's stuff) and had thrown up (in the loo - not all over everywhere). I was mortified and very, very disappointed and upset with her at the time but now I put it down to experience. She now knows that there's a reason that I say she should eat before she goes out, stick to one type of drink, and have a big glass of water between each alcoholic drink. She hasn't done it since.
The parties seem to have died out a little bit because so many of her friends are eighteen now and can go to bars and clubs. Although there are some eighteenth parties - usually at home, with a disco in a makeshift marquee-ish thing in the garden. Parents usually supply some drinks to get the evening started and canapes to provide some sort of lining of tummies but knowing that most of them will have brought something of their own.