One Response to ““Supervised” Underage Drinking”

1. Alli Says:
   July 20th, 2009 at 3:46 pm

   This past year, our school hosted a mandatory assembly, featuring a local public speaker J. Tom Morgan. My friends and I sat entranced, making the occasional comment on what we heard, and let me tell you, I was shocked. He spoke about a number of topics, including underage drinking and “sexting.” However, it was the drinking part of his speech that really struck me. As a lawyer, he currently represents several clients who have been caught drinking underage. He told us that it was illegal to drink underage, unless your parents had knowingly provided you with the alcohol. Ok, not so crazy to hear, maybe. My parents have always been very open about alcohol. They always allow me to try a SIP of their drink at dinner and always reiterate “anything within moderation and under control,” which is one of my mothers favorite catch all phrases.
   But does that mean she would ever provide alcohol to a child that wasn’t her own? No way. And she would never give me an entire drink, unless I was of a legal age and she trusted me to be responsible. In fact, I don’t even want to drink. My family and I went to France a couple years ago, and my mother wanted to go to a wine tasting. I guess the drinking age is much lower over their and they just handed me my own glass, I took a sip and immediately handed it over to my mother. She didn’t ask me to, but something about it just felt …wrong … plus, I didn’t like the taste of whatever it was I had just sipped.
   That being said, I know that if my parents ever caught me drinking at a friend’s house, not under their watchful eyes, I would be in so much trouble, even if there was “parental supervision” from a friend’s parent. This all seems kind of hypocritical to me, though. I’ve heard stories from my parents about their teenage years. My mom and grandmother were telling me that my grandparents used to host “beer parties” for my mom and her friends in high school, and many other parents did the same. However, at the same time, she made it clear that there was a different attitude towards drinking, then. She always made sure to emphasize that no one was drinking to get drunk. It was more of a social thing. And I think that’s exactly it: It’s all about ATTITUDE.
   Kids my age see things as the forbidden fruit. They push the limits just because they can. And under most circumstances, supervision is completely inconsequential. I remembered hearing a friend tell me about a party he went to once. He and the group he went with were kind of labeled as “goody-goodies.” According to him, he didn’t have a thing to drink all night, but many people did. And the kicker? The parents of the kid hosting the party were upstairs drinking with a couple of their friends who were supposed to be chaperoning. The parents were drinking and getting wasted, and so were the kids downstairs.
   J. Tom Morgan would argue that what they did was illegal, and it was. But I would say that more than that, the parents were setting a poor example for their children. They were proving that the kids had the right attitude about drinking: that it existed so that the consumer could get drunk. And therein lies the problem: Alcohol does not exist so that one can get drunk. It’s meant to be used in social situations, under control, and NOT to excess.

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