I’m confused too. 15 year old tries booze: shocking event!
I have a 17 year old daughter trying pot. I don’t condone it, but I’ve talked to her about it and we have an open dialogue. I can’t control what she does outside the house. I’ve laid some ground rules for inside the house. But really, it’s her responsibility to make her own decisions.
What good would punishment do? Drive a deeper wedge? My parents didn’t punish me when I was caught drinking booze or smoking pot: we talked. We had a discussion when they discovered a gram of hash in my cigarette pack when I was 18 or 19 years old. And then they let me keep it.
I was responsible. I was mature. I was in control.
A Mikes Hard Lemonade is hardly a thing to make a huge scene over. Shit, a five minute chat should suffice.
a) How big of a rule is drinking a beer, or possibly two, in the house?
b) How much do you care about the relationship between your daughter and you?
c) Does ‘B’ factor into ‘A’ enough to matter?
Your daughter is also the daughter of her mother and if you think this affects your daughter this bad then maybe her mother deserves to know.
However there are a some other things that concern me:
You are storing MIKES LEMONADE? Is there some reason that this is not stored at the store?
Why do you store alcohol next to sodas? Why didn’t you teenager-proof your house?
You have been a father, or a father-ish, figure for 15 years and have no idea on how to punish your daughter? And you think that the Dope would know better without knowing all the details?
I would say it isn’t the drinking so much as that she snuck the liquor out of the fridge and hid it from you. When I was that age, if I wanted to have a drink at say, a family event, it was okay, but if I got caught going in the liquor cabinet behind my parents’ backs, I’d have been in deep shit. I think you might want to address it from that angle first, and then see where it goes.
If I were you I’d hope for the best but fear the worst. The best would be your daughter seeing her mother’s life having detrimentally effected by her choices when young, the worst would be your daughter trying to out do her - mother-daughter rivalry is a thing.
Either way your daughter can be rebelling, which will give her a sense of significance and stature. Your making rules will give her more reasons to rebel, if you accept her choices and work with her - introduce her to craft beers and educate her on the consequences of addiction (sit with her and watch movies about drink/drug addicts) - you might change the outcome of her life.
Also there are implants to stop her getting pregnant. This seems too much but she’s 15, hormones going crazy and living in an unstable situation. This is no reflection on you as a father, just accepting the bad decisions at so young an age can easily happen. You can still implement house rules; never be alone with strangers, only drink with a meal, never hide or lie (you have to do that too), accept each other for what you are, and buy her girly stuff.
I really believe some people have a biological predisposition to alcoholism and have to work very hard to keep drinking under control. Hopefully your daughter is not one of them.
The advice your getting is great. Hopefully your daughter will grow with a mature attitude towards alcohol and other issues. I think your smart to keep the lines of communication open.
This is good advice. I very highly doubt that having one or two drinks at 15 is likely to do any sort of significant lasting harm in a medical or psychological context. The key issues are being aware of the law and legal consequences, and of a potential for alcoholism (which of course isn’t likely to happen just after a few drinks). In other words, how to act like an adult and make responsible adult decisions.
I’m not a parent, and I definitely can’t say the exact right or wrong thing to do in this situation. I think you can make it clear what the house rules are and that no alcohol is allowed in the house. But you can also explain why you are against underage drinking, and what the consequences are, and make it so it’s not just because you are old and uncool. I agree with others than I think for a first time offense, there should be either no punishment or very mild punishment, and there should be a conversation about expectations and consequences.
I’ve been offering my stepdaughter alcohol for years now … um, I mean, after she was about 15, whenever her mother and I are drinking I make it clear she can join us if she wishes. She’s never taken us up on it, but I don’t want drinking to have a forbidden-fruit aspect (and in the other direction, if she wants to try reasonably-harmless-in-moderation vices, I don’t want her to feel she can’t).
My first solution would be to not have alcohol in your house when she comes over. If your goal is to prevent her from drinking at your house, that’s a pretty good first step. She clearly isn’t getting her own, yet.
The second thing I will point out is that she’s exploring the boundaries. Despite what some Dopers would think I was a pretty normal teen. If I did anything I didn’t want my parents to find out about, I hid all the evidence. I think she’s testing you–whether she’ll get caught, and how you’ll react. She knows you don’t want her drinking.
I can’t really say much more, since I’m not a parent and neither me nor my sister ever even wanted to drink. Plus, I’ve never had a long drawn out conversation with anyone about how drinking went with them. Though I will say the defeatist attitude being shown above by many Dopers does not strike me well. I’ve known parents with the attitude that their kids will do what they want anyways, and their kids always have been pretty bad off.
The trick seems to be to balance lenience and strictness.
I think this is good advice. I would also point out to her that alcohol can be fine in moderation or it can lead to disaster, and that you’d like to trust her to make sound choices and leave her to her own devices, but if it looks like it’s heading down a bad path, there will be tons of parental meddling and intervention. Sneaking around and leaving empty sticky alcohol bottles under the bed being step 1 on the bad choices path. Not too late to turn around!
I’m not sure about that. That was then. There are real consequences today for buying beer which leads to some kids getting into an alcohol related accident.
OP, talking is the solution to this problem. Your daughter’s friends drink when they get a chance. She’s going to also. You have to teach her how to stay safe and stay out of trouble. Punishment won’t do that and might have the opposite result. Maybe you need some family counseling for more important issues, but a 15 year old trying out a Mike’s Lemonade isn’t a major issue in itself.
IMO, if any punishment is due, it’s for taking something that didn’t belong to her that she wasn’t supposed to have, without asking.
I have a 16 yo son. We made it pretty clear early on that if he stole alcohol from us, (that is, drank it without asking), we’d be pretty pissed. Just as we would be pissed if he stole other things from us.
We also made it clear that he is welcome to taste anything we are drinking and to have minimal amounts of alcoholic beverages in our presence. It seems to have worked for us because as far as I knew, we have not had any problems with him sneaking alcohol.
Its a matter of setting expectations early on, if you haven’t told your daughter what you expect either by your actions or by what you say and stuck with it from an early age the level of trust and respect won’t be there necessarily.
If i t was my daughter, I’d talk about making wise decisions and about how alcohol use is not the best way to care for your body. From there I’d set up a few consequences as a result. The first time around should not be the most severe. I’d take away her car keys for a week and bar her access to social media on my home network and tell her if it happened again that I would get the police involved. Telling them you’ll get the law involved puts the fear of god in them, it worked for me as a kid and i think it would work here too.
Yes - first a big conversation on drunkenness, poor decisions, and such. There isn’t much alcoholism in the family - at least as far as I know. It still can be talked about but I can’t use a family example to say, “Don’t be like Uncle Bob.”.
I think the consequence will be the car - learning to drive. She’s 15 and not driving yet but I can let her know that if she’s not responsible enough to be following the rules with alcohol (which, 'round here, is “no underage drinking”) then she’s not responsible enough to be driving.
Of course I need her mother’s buy-in for this… don’t know how well that’s going to go. Like I said earlier, her mom may not see an issue worthy of correction.