If Time Magazine says something, it must be true. This is for all you parents out there who subscribe to the theory that if you let your teen and their friends drink in your home, then you can keep them safe and teach them how to drink responsibly. I have always thought that this was "horse puckies". Turns out I was right. My take on parents who let their teen and their teen's friends drink at their house are just avoiding responsibility and a fight. They may even be hoping to throw back a few and be one of the gang. It turns out that parents who let kids drink at home are giving a different message. Instead of being safer, teens are getting the message that alcohol is no biggie. Adults get that all things in moderation are fine. Moderation is not part of a teen's vocabulary. If a little is good, more must be better. That is the motto teens live by. Teens interpret permission for drinking as permission to get trashed. Maybe not at that house, on that night, but if the grown-ups say drinking is cool, then drinking IS cool.
Here is an excerpt of the study I read about in Time Magazine, comparing the US, where it is ILLEGAL for adults to allow drinking in their homes, to Australia, where it is permissible to have adult supervised drinking parties. "Barbara McMorris, lead author of the study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, compared seventh graders from the U.S., which prohibits underage drinking, and Australia, where adult-supervised drinking for teens is allowed. By the ninth grade, 36% of the Australian teens had problems with binge drinking or other alcohol-related issues such as getting in fights and having blackouts, while only 21% of the American adolescents did. In fact, regardless of where they lived, youngsters who drank in front of adults were more likely to have drinking problems several years later than those who abstained."
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