Very relaxed attitude to alcohol in our house growing up.
There was never a lot of booze around but if any of us showed an interest we could have a sip from as early as I can remember.
From around 14 I’d be regularly in the local pub with my friends, having a quiet pint or two and a game of pool or darts. (I was on the pub teams for both at 14). The landlord knew what age we were but as long as we were sensible he didn’t care (and the police were lenient, they had bigger fish to fry)
My parents were sensible and moderate drinkers and I can’t ever recall them drunk so I reckon that was the best lesson of all i.e. drink should be no big deal and that is is entirely possible to have one or two and then stop. We are carrying on that lesson with our kids as well.
I cant fathom why the USA has a drinking age of 21.
It wasn’t a big deal in my family, I was allowed a sip of whatever my parents were drinking, mostly, I’m pretty sure, so they could laugh at my expression.
Drinking age here is 18, but I was allowed by my parents to go to the pub from age 16, as I looked older and could get served almost everywhere, with one condition; my elder brother had to be there. I did go out to nightclubs with him and his friends fairly often from that age. There was no way in hell he was going to let me get drunk and embarrass him, however.
I did get utterly trashed underage once without parental knowledge, though as it was ‘The Millennium’ new year’s eve and I was ‘staying at a friend’s house’, I suspect they had a fair idea.
My mother barely drinks a glass of bubbly at Christmas, Dad drinks pretty often, but I’ve only seen him a bit drunk a few times at parties (he does stuff like quoting poetry in Elvish, it’s pretty funny).
I was raised Roman Catholic and my parents were strict about drinking. My mom really wasn’t a big drinker. If there was a party she’d have a drink. My dad would have a couple beers a day. I remember being 18 and asking my dad if I could have a beer. He told me no. Legal age is 21, but I remember that floored me. I was 18, so an adult and I had been a responsible kid. I had good grades, held a job since I’d been 14 and they frowned upon me drinking a beer under their roof.
Interestingly, in the same period that saw drink-driving accidents fall by 50% in the USA, they fell an even greater amount in the UK (66%) and there was no such change in the law here.
Might be because most of us in Europe have about 4 years of drinking, getting drunk, getting familiar with your limits, etc. before we are even allowed to take a driving lesson.
I started drinking around 15, but once I got my driving license I was very strict about not drinking anything if I knew I was driving. I will admit that I have become less strict about that: one normal beer is fine, or if it is a long term thing I will have a few drinks, but stop about 4 hours before actually driving (while not getting blindingly drunk, obviously).
To elucidate … drinking is tradition in my family. From my always-with-a-scotch-in-his-hand great grandfather to my, fuck-you-you’re-doing-shots father’s side of the family, to my sure-I’ll-get-you-drunk-when-you’re-only-fourteen uncle, I too knew my limits before I set foot to accelerator. That said, there’s every possibility that I died on the side of the road somewhere around June '83 (the aforementioned prom night) and this has all been an elaborate fever-dream taking place in my unconscious mind. If so … sorry about Trump.
Just in case I do exist in reality, I decided to hang up my liver when I turned fifty. Drinking is a young man’s game.
I grew up in Wisconsin, which has always been among the states with the highest incidence of drinking (and binge drinking) in the U.S. Specifically, I grew up in Green Bay, which often tops the lists of “drunkest U.S. cities.” And, when I was growing up, the legal drinking age in the state was still 18 (it was raised to 19, then to 21, while I was in college). In short, drinking has always been part of the fabric of life in Green Bay.
My parents were (and are) social drinkers, but never, as far as I ever saw, to excess. They’ve always enjoyed a cocktail before dinner, and maybe a beer or a glass of wine with dinner, but that’s it.
I remember being at the wedding reception for a guy who worked for my parents (we owned a hardware store) when I was 13 or so; my parents gave me a beer to drink during the reception. I was a little, skinny kid, with no tolerance or experience, and one Old Style was enough to get me looped.
But, I was such a nerd, and such a straight arrow, that I really had no interest in drinking before I turned 18. This put me in the minority among my high school classmates, many of whom were already heavy drinkers by the time we were freshmen.
As an adult, I probably have 3-4 drinks a week, very rarely more than one in an evening. I have no idea if my parents’ relaxed view about drinking contributed to my never having an issue with alcohol (or if it was just luck, or good genes), but I’m thankful that they never treated it as forbidden fruit.
There was always a bottle of bourbon in the house, mainly for visitors. Never wine or beer. My father might take a drink from time to time, my mother never (her brother was an alcoholic) and I never drank in the house. In college, I would drink a beer from time-to-time, but I have no memory if my parents even knew that. Later on I drank a bit, today only occasionally. My wife and I split a bottle of beer for lunch today.
My parents are devout Catholics. It’s rather amazing how laid-back the attitude was, considering Dad’s father and grandfather were alcoholics. We were allowed sips of beer and wine as kids. We lived in Europe when I was a teenager, and I was allowed to have beer. Which spoiled me for life, because I can’t stand beer in America. At all. Even imports are dreadful.
I had a healthier attitude toward alcohol than the people I went to high school and college with. I did drink to excess once in college, and that was all I ever needed.
I’m now Southern Baptist, and I still drink, but very rarely–when I am with my family, who live far away.
The laid-back attitude was very different from anyone else I hung out with. We had no curfew. We just had to be home at a reasonable time and call if we weren’t going to be. The reason was that they “didn’t want us to get killed in a car accident racing home to beat the curfew.”
Growing up, my parents didn’t keep a drop in the house because my father is a recovering alcoholic. Even at parties and family get-togethers. But now they are much more laid back. I visited them a few weeks ago when they were throwing a big family bash, and there was a ton of beer and wine coolers. My father still doesn’t touch the stuff, but I guess now he feels confident he can control himself around it.
But I don’t think they were strict about alcohol. My grandmother would give us brandy all the time (I suspect just for shits and giggles, but she would probably claim otherwise), and my parents knew about it and didn’t care. My mother cried when you with the face and I got drunk (and high!) for our 21 birthday. But that’s just because we were no longer innocent little children in her eyes. My father didn’t give a fuck.
There are several pretty heavy drinkers in my family, tho when I was a kid, I assumed it was normal… but I digress.
We were allowed the occasional glass of wine (I don’t think Manischevitz concord grape really counts) and on the rare special event, we got to have fairly watered-down whiskey sours. A couple of my sibs liked beer, but I always thought it was nasty, so I passed on that.
I’m not sure how much that had to do with me not particularly caring about alcohol. For me, the big deal about turning 21 was that I got my pilot’s license that day. And, in reality, alcohol makes me sleepy, so unless I want help in that arena, I mostly avoid the stuff.
It was never a question or an option in my family. My parents drank, but it never even occurred to me to ask for a taste. When my older brothers would come home from college (in the 1970’s) with friends (who were in their 20’s), my mother would pour milk for everybody for dinner.
My parents, particularly Mom, were pretty cool about it and let us have a sip of what they were having if we wanted. I didn’t like the taste of beer; I still don’t.
But I think the important thing this did was destigmatize alcohol for us. It wasn’t forbidden fruit, so we didn’t go crazy over it once we were of drinking age. I hardly ever drink as a grown-up, maybe three glasses of champagne or wine in the course of a year.
My parents are teetolalers, so I never had a drink in their house until I was married with kids. Ms. P asked them if they minded is having a beer in their house, and they said no problem. Our 20 year old will have a beer occasionally, and started getting tastes when he was very young. Our 17 year old has tried beer\wine\liquor, but has no desire to drink so far.
Underage – not when driving or in a car and no sneaking.
Of age – never mentioned.
Dad had a beer most days; rarely two. And the only time I ever saw him drunk was his MILs (my Gramma’s) wake. Mother was a teetotaler but comes from a family of 100% drunks/substance abusers.
I grew up when Spain didn’t have a drinking age in the books. My parents made sure I learned about “drinking in moderation” and “stopping as soon as you feel a little bit off” before I was in HS; once I was there, part of the reason I was the first student in my year to get no curfew was that after two outings with curfews they knew I wasn’t going to get drunk (I hadn’t even tried alcohol either time; eventually I did drink beer occasionally but only on super-hot days and never to the point of dizziness).
I’m convinced that the creation of the drinking age was pushed by people who, on one hand, do not remember the contrariness of teenagers, and on the other are themselves lousy at impulse control. Since they can’t teach their kids to drink carefully, they expect the Gummint to do it for them. It doesn’t work; rather the opposite.
When I was around five, my dad would let me sip his beer. At 13, I remember a family friend (at an event with my mom) offering me a small glass of Chartreuse. In my teens, my mom would offer me a glass of wine or champagne for things like Christmas Eve. In my later teens, she knew I was probably drinking when I went out on a Friday night but mainly just asked me to be careful.
On the flip side, once after the age of 21 she found an empty vodka bottle under my bed and gave me hell because she thought I had it there to sneak it. In reality it kind of just wound up under there and I never drank in my bedroom. I think she just worried because her parents were alcoholics.
So she was usually pretty casual about it without making it “let the kid get drunk”. More of taking the mystery out of “Ooohhh… alcohol!”. I drank in college like most kids and still enjoy a drink now and then but that’s maybe once a month and almost never a second or third.
