Experts are using Alcohol Awareness Month (April) to spread a simple, direct message: Don’t be those parents.
Those parents host drinking teenagers at their homes, reasoning that it’s a safer alternative to letting teens roam on the weekends. (We can monitor their intake and activities. They won’t be drinking and driving. We’re the approachable parents.)
“Bad idea,” Barbara Greenberg, clinical psychologist and co-author of “Teenage as a Second Language: A Parent’s Guide to Becoming Bilingual.”
Alcohol Awareness Month prompted Greenberg to pen an open letter to parents for Psychology Today. “I have heard of too many teens dying because of alcohol overdoses and alcohol-related traffic accidents and I wish these tragedies could be averted,” she wrote.
Greenberg’s term for about allowing teenagers to drink under your watchful eye is “bringing the party home.”
“First of all, it’s not legal,” she said. “So it models deceit. It gives the impression that we’re above the law. … If laws are optional, that carries over to other areas,” she said. “ ‘Can I go above the speed limit? Can I text and drive? Yeah, I think I can.’ That’s what happens when you introduce doubt into the law.”
But they’re teenagers, Greenberg always hears. They’re going to drink.
“You can make it difficult for your kids to go to places where you think they’re going to drink,” she says. “You can set consequences if they drink, and you can stick with them. Hold your kids responsible for their safety and the safety of their friends.”
The practice also drives a wedge between other parents and their children.
“Most parents who bring the party home are not calling the other parents to tell them what they’re doing,” Greenberg said. “It’s polarizing. You’re giving the message, ‘We’re the cool parents. Yours are not.’”
Which is a message with a host of negative consequences, she argues.
“I see this with my patients all the time. ‘I’d rather have so-and-so as parents. They’re cool,’” she says. “They’re not cool. They’re permissive. Research shows the best parents are not permissive and they’re not authoritarian, ‘You’ll do this because I said so.’
“The best parents are authoritative. They set rules with love. They give limits and explain why.”
You could mention, for example, that drinking before your brain has fully developed dramatically increases your risk for addiction, according to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.
Or that alcohol use by teens is associated with traffic fatalities, violence, suicide, educational failure, overdose and unsafe sex, according to the same group. Or that alcohol is more likely to kill young people than all illegal drugs combined. (Same group.)
And spelling out your clear boundaries for your kids can make a big difference in whether and how much they drink, Greenberg said.
“If you go on the record as being opposed to underage drinking, that’s going to affect your kids’ sense of right and wrong,” she said. “That stays with them. You want them to internalize what you believe.
“More than anything, believe it or not, kids don’t want to disappoint their parents,” she continued. “They don’t care that much if you get angry. But they don’t want to disappoint you.”
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