Let’s be honest; we try as best we can as parents to keep an eye on our kids and to keep them safe, but it is humanly impossible to be everywhere all of the time, especially once they start driving. I have always tried to have an open door policy when it came to having discussions with my daughter because I always told her that if she was not honest with me and got into trouble I would not be able to help her.
I knew that she and her friends were drinking at parties and at each other’s houses during sleepovers, as we all did as teenagers, so I told her to never get into a car with someone that had been drinking or drive herself if she had been drinking.
We have all been teenagers and we all drank with our friends without our parent’s knowledge. Usually we were at one of our friend’s homes and their parents were not there or they were asleep or we went to a party and drank there. The end result was usually someone driving home under the influence, which could have been disastrous. There have also been those occasions when some girl was given alcohol at a party and taken advantage of. Both of these are scary scenarios, so, as a parent I made the decision to introduce my daughter to alcohol at home when she turned 16.
It all started quite casually. If I were having a glass of wine I would sometimes let her drink from my glass and then I began giving her a glass of her own. Other times I would make her a light drink of vodka, gin or rum mixed with some sort of juice or a soft drink. I did this because I wanted her first of all to know what alcohol tasted like so that she could recognize the taste if someone spiked her drink without her knowledge and secondly I wanted her to feel the effects so that she would know how much she could have before she started to lose control of her faculties.
I have seen and heard horror stories about kids driving under the influence and also of girls being gang raped at parties because alcohol was given to them and they were not familiar with the taste to know that something was wrong with their drink or how their body would react to the drink.
Once my daughter was given the opportunity to experience alcohol at home, by her own admission it lost its allure for her out in the streets. By giving her alcohol at home it also gave her the chance to understand that you have to be in control of your drinking and not have your drinking be in control of you.
I know some of you are thinking that I was crazy and that it was illegal to give my 16-year-old alcohol at home but to me I was being proactive. What are your thoughts on serving alcohol to your 16 year old in the privacy of your own home?
