How Not to Drink at Teen Parties

Posted by: Lourdes Lee Valeriano on November 13

Parenting teens often feels like starting school a few days after the semester has begun. Things come at you fast. One day you’re wondering whether your daughter still needs a child sitter and the next it seems you’re supposed to be worrying about alcohol abuse.

It’s with this sense of scrambling to stay on top of things that I attended a talk on teen parties hosted by a parent group at my daughter’s school. But while the panel, comprising a district attorney, a psychiatrist, a specialist on addiction medicine, and two twentysomething graduates of the school, provided plenty of reasons why parents should be worried (by the end of the evening I was ready to shop for a locked medicine cabinet), it was woefully short on strategies for a teen to use in situ—parties where alcohol and drugs are on offer.

Which was frustrating, since it seems that most everybody—from the panelists to many parents I know—take it as inevitable that despite my best efforts, some gatherings that my fourteen-year-old and her friends soon will be going to are likely to a) be unchaperoned in practice if not in name and b) have alcohol and drugs. As a thirteen-year-old daughter of a friend opined after reading my post last month about teen parties without parents, even if mom and dad were home, they could be in another room or floor and would not or would rather not know what’s going on with the kids. (All this boggles the mind, since drugs and underage drinking are illegal, and the host’s parents, if they are on the premises, could be prosecuted. One handout from the talk came from Student Assistance Services Corp. of Tarrytown, N.Y. It said parents should always call the parents of the party giver and ask specific questions about their plans to supervise the party and about whether alcohol and drugs would be allowed. That way, if the host’s parents were inclined not to supervise or to look the other way, they may think twice about doing so after the conversation.)

What’s a teen who is social but who fears her parent’s wrath—and who really doesn’t want to drink/do drugs anyway—to do, short of leaving the party? One friend tells her sons, should they find themselves in a situation where kids are passing a bottle or joint, to say: “No thanks guys, I’m already in sooooo much trouble at home. If I come home smelling like anything at all, I’ll be grounded for life.” This keeps them from appearing “goody-goody,” she says, and even gives them an excuse to leave, since they don’t want to reek.

Another mom says her daughter, now a high school senior, has become really good at nursing a bottle of beer throughout an evening. Tacitly understood, of course, is that she has given her daughter permission to drink beer, if only as a cover.

Looking for more suggestions, I trolled the Net. I came up with a lot of parental shoulds and discussions on good communication, but few party survival strategies. One exception was a post at momlogic.com with the provocative title “Teach Your Teen How to Drink.” With the avowed goal of teaching teens how to maneuver a party without drinking but looking like they’re drinking, parts of the blog read almost like parody. But parts made sense and seemed like good additions to my daughter’s tool kit.

The first advice was “if you can say no, just say no.” Don’t elaborate beyond a casual “no thanks,” it says, because rationales just beget arguments.

And if a simple no, doesn’t work, the piece offered strategies on how to lose a drink:

Take a mini sip…then go over to give someone who just came in a hug and put down the drink and forget to pick it back up. This also works well for “playing DJ,” dancing, or rummaging through a purse.

From that point on, the ploys became more elaborate (how to spill a drink, how to take a shot without drinking, pretend to be too drunk to take another), so much so that I think that if one has to do all this work pretending, one might as well leave the party.

Still I think these ruses are good to know. I realize that by offering my daughter these gambits, I’m allowing her not to make a principled stand against drinking and drugs. I’m fine with that. She could take a stand if she wants to, but I would rather that she has an out as well.

Any party survival tips that have worked for your kids—or for you?

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