Binge Drinking
Terrell is 17 years old and maybe he said it best.
“I did a lot of stupid things while I was drunk, like about a thousand things, really.”
I think there are two lessons imbedded in his comment. He is not talking about being stupid after having a drink, having one beer or maybe two. He means he got stupid when he drank way too much, when he got drunk. Many will argue that at the age of 18, 19, 20, kids shouldn’t drink at all but the real problem is that so many kids binge drink, they slug down a 12-pack, or six or eight or 10 drinks at one sitting. They haven’t learned to go slow, to pay attention to the signs that they’re approaching the edge of losing control. In fact, that’s their goal, to feel oblivious and bullet-proof. They don’t know, they haven’t learned yet that getting happy and goofy and silly under the influence has a dark side. That’s the other lesson here: he’s right – there are about a thousand things that can go wrong.
Fights, black-outs, injuries, sex, car crashes, crime, lawsuits, arrest & prosecution, guilt, depression, addiction, ruined reputations, heartbreak for family and friends, on and on. And all of these, singly and in combination, happen a thousand times a day.
A central question in parenting is… can our children only learn “the hard way”? Or, said differently, can they learn about the danger of drinking, especially binge drinking, not by getting drunk, but by having lots of lively and informative talks with their parents starting when they’re really young? In conversations repeated year after year, can parents help a teenager feel in his gut the danger of drinking and driving, or does that child have to get drunk, get behind the wheel, and then crash?
Both teaching methods may be effective but it seems to me one of them is obviously better than the other.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Last New Year’s Eve one of my guy friends decided to throw a party. At the last minute I bailed to go to the Peach Bowl with one of my best friends. I was unsure whether or not I was making the right decision, but the next day, as I checked Facebook, I realized that going to that football game was probably one of the best decisions I ever made that year.
I picked up my phone on January 1st and was immediately bombarded about the wild scene one of my friends had created for herself the previous night in front of all of our friends. Apparently the night had started off relatively calm until my friend decided that this would be the night she would get trashed. She arrived at the party with a loaded water bottle filled completely with vodka. She proceeded to drink the entire bottle by herself in under two hours. What I immediately wondered was why did all of my other friends just stand by and watch her make herself sick? No one else at that party was drinking; she obviously stood out like a sore thumb. My second thought was why on earth did she feel the need to drink to have a good time? Was she really that desperate?
By the end of the night my friend was throwing up and blacking out. She had caused a huge scene and had to be carried out by her ex-boyfriend and his mom. At the end of the night, all the attention that she had received was completely negative. To make matters even worse, there had been pictures posted all over Facebook of her looking completely wasted. When my friend called me the next morning she made sure to be quick to inform me that this was a one time thing. Did I believe her? Not at all. Did I feel sorry for her? Of course.