Did your parents know about your sexual activity and/or your drinking as a teen?
Was this a function of basic parenting skills – that is, SHOULD they have known? Or can a parent with basic parenting skills reasonably be unaware of a teenager’s experiments with sex or alcohol?
Yes, they knew but I didn’t actively tell them. They didn’t strongly object to my drinking (but made sure I understood that I should NEVER get in a car with someone who had been drinking). It was just sort of something teens do.
As for sex, we keep our sex lives private TYVM. I could have been more informed about birth control but I was smart enough to figure it out. They knew that I had serious boyfriends and assumed we were having sex.
In other words no option for me.
I’ll take an essay response. 
Would you say that a parent with basic parenting skills would automatically know that their child was having sex and/or drinking? Or could a reasonable teen hide those things from a reasonable parent?
The drinking would have been hard to hide, what with the staggering and throwing up and all.
The sexual activity would have been easy to hide, if Mom hadn’t gone snooping into my stuff.
Taken from the prior thread:
I never had a sip of alcohol till I was at college, an dI never got drunk before the latter part of my 30th year, so the booze bit doesn’t really apply to me. (Except that my father would even now chastise me if he knew I have the very occasional Scotch.)
As for sex: hell no, they didn’t know. No amount of sexual activity, voluntary or not, would have been acceptable to them, and my father in particular is/was a flipping idiot on such matters.
Responding to the poll: I somehow managed to vote in the wrong category. But it hardly matters because there was no answer that really fit; the poll choices presume that people both drank and had sex, which was not the case for me.
But there’s simply no way I would have ever told my parents anything about my sexual behavior. I was adept at keeping secrets.
I know friends who certainly hid the sex part and at least tried to (less successfully) hide the drinking part from parents that (at least from the outside) appeared actively involved.
I can’t really answer as, while I wasn’t flaunting anything, I wasn’t hiding, either.
Why do you ask, BTW?
I need multiple answers for the poll. Drinking, no, I don’t think she knew about. Sex? Yes, because I trusted her and told her.
The drinking was really minimal, to be honest, and as I was always safe about it (never while driving, never got into a car with someone who had been drinking, only drinking in moderation if I was staying at the location the drinking started until morning, etc.), I never felt the need to tell her about it. I knew it would get my freedom curtailed drastically if I did.
As for the underlying question, my mom had fantastic parenting skills until I hit puberty. Then she was at a loss, and rather harder on me than my behavior warranted (I feel as the parent of a current teenager). So there *were *things I kept from her, but when I had sex, I told her.
Of course, I got pregnant that night and didn’t know it yet, so she would have figured it out fairly shortly after that, anyhow.:smack:
Did my parents lack basic parenting skills because they didn’t figure out I was having sex with my boyfriend? It’s an interesting question.
When I was 18 I told my mother I started having sex when I was 15 and she was truly genuinely shocked. I don’t think it ever crossed her mind that the hours between the end of school and my parents coming home from work could be used for anything but homework and babysitting my two younger brothers.
I was a really straight arrow teen, great grades, president of the Latin Club and also kind of shy. I just didn’t look like the kind of person who would have sex. Apparently I look really wholesome. I think casual observers assumed I was a virgin at my wedding.
It wasn’t some scam I was running. I wasn’t pretending to be someone I wasn’t. I was just your All-American girl-next-door type who wanted to try sex (and once I tried it wanted to try again).
For me aged 16, the boozing I thought I could hide… I was definitely able to act quite sober - but now I realise me and my buddies must have stank of booze when my mother came to pick us up from the park where we’d been chugging vermouth. She must have known. Similarly the smoking - a couple of breath mints doesn’t hide a damn thing.
The sex, I only got found out when my condoms blocked the drain and my dad unclogged it and they came floating to the top. My mother was so upset it must have come as a shock to her.
It’s not a question you asked, but the drugs, no, they never realised: they were too naive. I once overheard my mother saying to my dad, of me and my brother in the kitchen, “the boys are acting strange tonight - they’re speaking really slowly and eating everything in the fridge”. But no suggestion we were stoned.
I was stupid enough to believe my mom that she wouldn’t get mad if I told her I’d lost my virginity. Well, she didn’t technically get mad. But she did cry for a few days.
As far as drinking goes, I started having the occasional sip of wine at nice family dinners when I was 15 or 16. Drinking was never really an issue.
They knew. I told them about some stuff. I told them the first time I smoked pot. I wasn’t that much of a drinker (more of a pothead), but I didn’t hide when I did drink, sometimes drank right in front of them and occasionally had a beer with my dad (I wasn’t getting wasted, though - it was just a beer or two back then).
I didn’t tell them the first time I got laid, but my dad had already been surreptitiously leaving condoms in my room, and darkly warning me not to get any girls pregnant.
The one thing I really tried to hide was smoking cigarettes, but they knew about that too. You can’t really hide that.
By the way, the OP is being slightly disingenuous about the question. In the Sarah Palin thread, we were talking about a daughter who had her boyfriend living with her and sharing her bedroom. She was also posting Facebook pictures of herself drinking and doing bong hits. The “basic parenting skills” in that case referred simply to the ability to infer that a daughter is sexually active if a guy is actually sleeping in her room, or paying attention to their facebook pages.
Drinking: Yeah, I fessed up. I’m pretty sure my parents would have realized it wasn’t the cat who was making the scotch disappear.
My Dad was just disappointed that I’d mixed the scotch with coca cola.
As for sex–I actually didn’t lose my virginity till I was out of my teens and then my Dad just said “You’d better be using protection. I’m too young to be a grandfather.”
Oh not again.
I started smoking cigarettes at age 9. If my dad knew that he would have killed me. I started drinking every weekend with my friends at about 14/15…by then my dad had died.
I got my first boyfriend at 16.
My mom knew about the drinking and thought she knew I was having sex, from 14 on up. She was convinced because I used to drink and smoke and hang out with boys all night long. I would sneak boys in my basement and they would sneak out in the morning. Know what we were doing? Talking, teen-philosophizing, playing hip hop, smoking weed, drinking, laughing, making bonds.
When I finally did have sex with my boyfriend at age 16, it was no one from that crowd of kids I hung out with at all. Still, all of my family was convinced I was wild and promiscuous while I was yet a virgin.
I didn’t drink much in high school, and don’t really remember anything about my parents’ opinion of it, but I don’t recall particularly trying to hide it when I did drink. Wasn’t a big deal either way.
Sex; my mom asked me to tell her when I started, and I did and she got me birth control pills without making a fuss about it. I had reasonable parents, and nothing bad ever happened.
Holy Athena, man. We don’t actually need you to judge who is and is not being disingenuous in every thread.
They assumed I drank, and one time I told them I spent the night with a friend, not safe to drive. Mom was pissed, but dropped it since I did the right thing. I didn’t siphon from dad’s supply, I had other sources.
They assumed I had sex, even to the extent of a bag of condoms showing up in my bathroom (probably put there by my father). No discussions, other than my father telling me that getting a girl pregnant in our town was her ticket to a better life, and a way to really mess up mine (true, given the poverty in my town and our relative wealth).
So their general intelligence allowed them to assume I drank and had sex I guess.
My parents divorced when I was 4 and they had different approaches. I lived with my father and stepmother, and they were much more strict than my mother and stepfather.
My mother witnessed me drunk at a pig roast my sister took me to when I was 16. She knew in advance that I was going and didn’t seem to mind.
When I was 15 I told my dad that I was going to crash at a buddy’s place for a couple of nights while school was out for spring break. He knew the buddy, yet he insisted that I take him to meet this buddy’s parent. My dad probably suspected that I might be doing stuff that I shouldn’t, but at least made sure that I would be doing it around people who weren’t completely irresponsible (or he wanted to mortify me into not going in the first place).
I kept my girlfriends to myself.