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There is always an older sibling of a friend willing to "help" or go hang out at grocery store and look for a kind face then ask if he/she will buy you some beer/wine/whatever. If they say no, move on to the next kind face.
Pfhtex You are right Sad teen have to see and know so much more and YES they are smart ,That make me think They should and do know drink will cause death etc but yet go on and do it, Do you think it is the parent from letting the teen just do what every they want , I worked with children and teen sads so many parent from toddler up just let them do what they want and then when they become teens the think it ok. I don care what the law is, As for them drinking I did not do it till late 20 for a few years waste of time and money, for me , Teens have so much more to look forward to yet have so much more to keep them in trouble/.Drug/alc/sex/etc.
They have friends who get it for them, alcohol is just a small part of the problem today. Meth, pot, crack plus many other drugs are everywhere and easy to obtain. Some of the new synthetic drugs can purchased online, people are getting more creative about getting high and using things that were not intended for that purpose.
How about people stop demonizing it for anyone under 21? Kids have seen more by age ten than most people over 50 saw by twice that age. Treat teenagers with more intellectual respect, and realize that they have the capacity to learn.
OR, dangle it over their heads and wag your finger at them, so they have to sneak it, so that when they finally get their hands on it, they don't know what they are doing and they make a mistake that cannot be undone.
It's true kids are almost t never taught to drink responsibly.
Do you think they're doing it any differently than when you were a teen (or I was)?
Although when I was a teen pot was cheap and easy to get...
about the only people who drank much then were the gear heads.
I don't know your age, but believe it or not, there was a time, when we either didn't drink in highschool or we had our first beer during our senior year. As for pot, we hardly knew what that was. The only kids who used liguor or pot were the less than desirable ones. They hung out together, I guess partied together and were anything but main stream. In fact most of them dropped out of school by about 16 or 17. If they made it to their senior year they didn't graduate. Even when my daughter was in highschool not many kids drank regularly...
Now to the OP, I think the kids get it from robbing partents liquor cabinet, I know the little bit of drinking our 2 daughters did, was done that way: poured a little of this, a little of that into other bottles and though we wouldn't notice. Guess what, they were right. They also get it from older friends and some kids have fake IDs. I think this is more common in college though.
How about people stop demonizing it for anyone under 21? Kids have seen more by age ten than most people over 50 saw by twice that age. Treat teenagers with more intellectual respect, and realize that they have the capacity to learn.
OR, dangle it over their heads and wag your finger at them, so they have to sneak it, so that when they finally get their hands on it, they don't know what they are doing and they make a mistake that cannot be undone.
So you are saying, there should be no legal age for drinking? I am sorry, I have to totally disagree with you ont this one. I do think, there are cases where 18 year olds should be allowed to drink, but other than that the law should remain 21. When our our youngest was in high school and his sister a college student, it was legal to drink in Va at 18. Our daughther said, there was so much more drinking at our son's highschool for that reason. It is harder, when you are 17 to find someone 21 to buy it for you,than it is to find someone 18 to buy it. Until then, I didn't really care if the age was 18. I will add, none of our kids were hollier than though or are they tee tottlers.
I will add, we did introduce our kids to booze before they left for college, and my father did the same with me, while I was a senior in highschool. He wanted me to understand how to be a social drinker, not a lush. My daughter did the same with her to girls.
LOL, you sound shocked that they can get it. Like a law just makes it impossible. No, that just makes it more fun.
If they want something badly enough they will find a way to get it. I didn't have a drink until I was like 18, but I had friends who were drinking since 12. I don't know where they got it but they had it every weekend.
I don't know if we forget what its like to be teens or what, but adults and their policies seem to make things worse. We had a "mock funeral" at our local high school a few years back. This is something they do before prom to discourage drinking. All I could think is what my peers would have done if we'd had the same thing. My friends would have still gotten drunk and then been mocking it all night (after pretending to their teachers and parents that it had made such a profound difference).
We can't really address these things "as a society". IMO that's just taking responsibility off parents. Parents need to be more involved and willing to be annoying. There kids are still going to have access to the alcohol, but parents need to be so involved in their kids life that they can notice these changes. And still, even with the most alert parents, some kids are going to fall through the cracks.
As another poster said, we can't protect everyone from everything.
Kids today are linked into so many people on facebook etc.. It used to be that college kids hung out with college kids and HS with HS but today High School kids are partying with the college kids who are old enough to buy booze.
Drinking is HUGE for the underage. There are way too many movies where the characters drink until they are trashed and then wake up with tatoos on their faces. In real life the tatoos don't come off in makeup, the sexual assault is real, and the video your friends took of you taking off your clothes then throwing up in the pool is on the internet forever for all to see and laugh at.
Kids get the alcohol from older friends or siblings, fake ID's, begging or offering cash to someone heading into the packy and on hte rise seems to be parents that have parties and supply the booze with the thought that the kids will be staying safely on premise. All these ways are against the law of course.
many kids are immature and can't handle drinking, it would be one thing to drink to get a buzz on but many don't know to stop and they get trashed.
I see drinking being more of a problem and causing more damage in this country than guns do.
It's funny you ask that.
I wouldn't have had the first clue where to get drugs when I was a teen until I got to college (1990s).
And the only place I would have known to get booze is stealing it from my parents.
But I had better things to do.
I think this highlights the idea that watching who your kids are friends with and keeping them away from bad influences isn't as fairy tale-ish as we often think. My parents never said, "Don't hang out with druggie/drinkie kids." In fact, they never demonized alcohol...it was just understood that we obey the law at our house.
But they wanted me to hang out with people who were serious about their goals and came from good families. Voila.
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