The Toughest Teen Drinking Question

Last weekend was homecoming for our local high school.  The day after the dance Twitter accounts and text messages in our community blew up due to a couple of teen-aged drinking incidents that occurred both at the high school dance and after dance parties.  I picked up bits and pieces of the stories from my daughter and other parents and as I’m sure many parents did, I attempted to have yet another “drug and alcohol” discussion with my daughter.  

I find these discussions difficult because I wasn’t always perfectly behaved (slight understatement) as a teen-ager yet I am now a parent and my job is to do my best to educate and protect my children.  The bottom line is that excessive drinking is dangerous and any drinking by teen-agers is dangerous.  These are facts and not just my opinion.  Other facts are that many teen-agers test limits, experiment, make bad decisions, and don’t have fully developed rational brain functioning.  So teen discussions can be trying at best and a miserable nightmare at worst.

I could use the same talk that my parents gave me yet it seems a tad underwhelming and lacking the nuance that might be necessary for today’s savvy teen.  It went something along the lines of, “Be good and if anything bad happens to you, you will be grounded for the rest of your life.”  My parents were good parents but they were oddly optimistic about their two teens in that they seemed somewhat oblivious to the near misses my brother and I were prone to. 

My conversation with my daughter was moving along at a bad dream vs. nightmare pace until she looked at me and asked, “Would you still love me if I drank?”  I would love my children if they were serial killers with bad hygiene yet I felt that her question was still a tough one.  I don’t want my children to drink before they are 21.  I can’t guarantee that that will happen but I want it to.  So if I say, “I will love you even if you drink” am I implicitly giving her permission to do just that?

And this is where the topic of teen-aged behavior becomes a particularly challenging one.  How do we love, support, and advocate for our children while still setting appropriate limits and still love them unconditionally when they break or test the limits?    How do we say to them, “I love you so much that I can’t stop from reminding you how much I want you to be unlike a teen-ager and never make a mistake and never take a risk?”  How do we honor adolescence yet stick to our morals and beliefs without locking them in the house until they turn 21?  

How do we keep ourselves from killing other parents and children who put our children at risk yet acknowledge that our own child wasn’t innocent in the process?  I know that there is no perfect answer, no perfect parent, and certainly no perfect child.  I know that really wonderful parents have kids that do really dumb, dangerous things and I know that really, really crappy parents sometimes have great children.   And how could we ever live with ourselves if we didn’t do our very best to keep them safe and something terrible happened? 

Positive that a seasoned psychologist like myself could certainly summon some sage advice sprinkled with subtle moral lessons, I sputtered my way to a response for my daughter.  After a few rather tense moments I answered my daughter in the only way that I could, “I will love you no matter what but if anything bad ever happens to you, you will be grounded for the rest of your life.”

Lisa Kaplin is a psychologist and life coach at www.smartwomeninspiredlives.com