Coincidentally we were talking to two families this weekend, parents in their mid 50s, kids 18-21. Irish Americans, born in the US to first generation immigrants.
When they were growing up in the 1970s/80s. It was quite normal for their parents to pour them a tiny glass of wine at Sunday lunch at Grandma’s pretty must starting after their first communion and increasing in amount and frequency after that.
Neither set of parents ever served their own children any alcoholic beverages. It just became less socially acceptable. Kids are still drinking, but not at home.
My parents in Pakistan did the same thing as we were growing up anlso in the 1970s/80s except the wine was only a Christmas thing, not every Sunday. But at all the Christmas “visiting” you’d be served a little wine or ginger beer.
When my sisters and I were little kids, my grandma gave us blackberry brandy when we had just about any kind of ailment. She’d heat it up in a saucepan and give it to us in a shot glass. My mom would give us a shot glass of wine for some fancy occasions.
I could have more than a sip of wine or beer with my family long before it was legal for me to drink. Don’t know if it would have been allowed at restaurants since we never went to restaurants. But it’s probably relevant that both sides of my family came to the US recently enough that I knew the immigrants. My kids could drink at holidays if they wanted to - and I specify holidays because that’s really the only time my husband and I drink at home.
The higher the drinking age is set , the less likely it is that someone will be clearly underage. By the time I was 14 at the latest , I wasn’t clearly under the drinking age of 18. I’m not even sure if I was clearly under 21 when I was 14 and I definitely wasn’t clearly under 21 when I was 17.
FWIW, in my family children, starting at quite a young age, could have a tiny bit of wine or whatever with dinner; the quantity increasing as the child grew older. By the time I was in my mid-teens IIRC I could have a full glass – certainly by the time I was 17 and my father tried (and failed) to get me served at a restaurant. (Legal age at the time was 18). Most little kids didn’t like it; though I remember one nephew wanting more when he was quite small. (He didn’t get it, but it was treated more as ‘no you don’t get to eat too much dessert’ than as ‘help a budding alcoholic!’ and he’s now in his 50’s and has shown no signs of alcoholism.)
I never saw anybody drunk at home. I learned that alcoholic drinks were a thing you used in moderation, and I had no urge to go get drunk as soon as I came of age. I think that making alcohol a thing Only For Adults backfires in many cases – teenagers generally want to do what the Grownups can do, but they’re not allowed to learn how to do it properly. And if drinking alcohol is associated with family dinner parties, any urge to do so out of rebellion is pretty much destroyed.
For some people with a strong physical tendency towards alcohol addiction, it may be a bad idea.
I don’t know how common it is in the US; but I’ve certainly seen other people do it, both with wine and with beer, depending on what the grownups were drinking
Yeah, forbidding it doesn’t stop it. And it may encourage doing it wrong.
I’m a Jew. Like most Jewish kids, i got drunk at passover at least once. (I mean, you’re supposed to have 4 cups of wine!) And as a teen, we sometimes celebrated the Sabbath at Friday dinner, which meant everyone had a small glass of wine.
The laws were looser when I was a child, but I’m pretty sure those would both still be legal in my state today. K other things i did wouldn’t be.) I know that when my son was a teen he did a careful study of the law, and determined it was legal for him to drink if i handed him the booze. Maybe we had to be in the same room, too. So when a friend who made his own wine was handing out samples, the friend would give me two glasses, and I’d give one to my son.
Unlike my parents, we offered the kids grape juice for passover, because my MIL was a recovering alcoholic. That meant my husband and his mom didn’t want to drink any wine, and also, we didn’t want the kids to have a lot of it, since there’s a strong genetic component to alcoholism. But after discussing it with MIL, we did also serve wine, and the kids were always allowed to have some. Just discouraged from getting drunk.
My brother was 18 and would hand his driver’s license to a 15-yo friend when he needed to buy alcohol. This was the days before pictures on drivers’ licenses. My brother (like me) was stunted until after age 18 (I sprung up 4 inches the year high school ended) whereas his buddy at 15 was over 6 feet and a thyroid exomorph, looked 20. (definitely looked over 18) It was easier than arguing the “No, that’s me I really am 18!”
That was my thought. We’d get a finger of wine with special dinners at an early age, and so unlike many of my peers, drinking under age and hitting the bars seriously at 18 did not hold any special appeal to me. Drinking, like smoking, just seemed a waste of money.
To be honest, my wife and I have discussed something pretty similar for our own children, but thus far, they’ve been absolutely unwilling after a sip or two.
Our plan so far to try and keep our kids from going berserk when they turn 21 is to model responsible alcohol use- maybe have a beer or glass of wine every now and then with dinner, or just while watching a movie or something, but to not go after it hammer and tongs either. My thinking is that if they see us, their grandparents, me and my friends, etc… doing it responsibly as adults, that’ll normalize that sort of behavior and contrast it with the more Delta House style drinking that goes on. Doesn’t mean they won’t drink in college, but they’ll be aware of what responsible alcohol use looks like and by extension, how far from that they are.
The argument for raising the drinking age was that kids shouldn’t learn to drink and to drive at the same time, and that driving is the more socially useful one. This has done a good job of reducing auto deaths. But i think it’s come at a cost of serious alcohol problems on college campuses. Since most of the drinking is illegal, there are no chaperones, no responsible adults present. There’s been a big increase in binge drinking, almost certainly as a result.
Personally, I’d like to see the drinking age dropped to 12, so most kids would learn to drink with parents/responsible adults around. Beef up the liquor liability laws. (laws around serving people who are already drunk)
How old are they? I don’t think I started liking the taste at all until I was in my teens. (I also thought coffee tasted horrible, and couldn’t stomach most tomato sauces, and hated the taste of a number of other things that I like now.)
I wouldn’t offer at all. I’d let them know that when I’m drinking won’t, they may ask for some. I guess i kinda offer at passover, “do you want wine or grape juice? The good wine or the traditional manischevitz?”
I remember being given wine at a Christmas dinner, at home, when I was very young; I also remember hating the burning sensation as it went down my throat. This was in Illinois, circa 1971.
The argument for raising the drinking age in Ontario to 19 was that 18-year-olds are still in high school at and so socializing with younger kids and liable to supply them with alcohol.
So now that the age is 19 hgh school kids never consume alcohol, eh?
Let’s put a finer point on that. Ontario had five years of high school, not four. Never mind why (and there are reasons), but the upshot was that Ontario Grade 13s were 18 years old, and could thus go down to the corner pub after a hard day of high school.
I should know; I did. I was 18 in Ontario when the age was 18, and we’d go down to the pub after school. That was bad, apparently. As I recall, we had a lot of Helen Lovejoys saying, “Won’t somebody think of the children?” Well, Mrs. Lovejoy, the kids were alright, having a couple of beers after school. Hell, I was.
Anyway, Ontario changed the age to 19, to get it out of high school. Then years later, Ontario got with the program that 12 provinces and territories, and fifty states followed, and eliminated Grade 13 (or OAS, or whatever they called it then), but didn’t change the age. So now you had a bunch of 18-year-old first-year university/college kids who were illegal, while their older friends were legal.
If I remember my undergrad years correctly, nobody cared. If you’re in the university/college, you’re fine. Things may have changed since then, however.
That was the argument when i was in high school, and the drinking age was 19. But the US raised it to 21 largely on the “driving” argument. And there has been an increased problem with binge drinking in colleges ever since. It used to be that booze was mostly legal for college kids, and everyone overlooked the occasional under-19 kids drinking in college, and there were large parties with alcohol but also with adults hanging around keeping an eye on things. But when booze became mostly illegal for college kids, the parties moved underground, and had to be held without adults.
I turned 18 in Grade 13 and I’d skipped a grade. Not sure what the criteria was for entering school, but as I understand kids are still 18 before grade 12 is done now. Drinking age then was 18. It was a standing joke that in the final year sometimes students would hit the bar on the way home - yearbook comment “does magic tricks - walks down the street and turns into a bar.” However, even in grades 11 and 12, some religious retreat weekends turned into drunkfests from what I heard, not to mention parties where some kids got drunk.
I remember hopping into a car with a bunch of other university students one year and driving down to Buffalo after the bars closed at 1PM because they were open to 4PM there.
My observation was that it had to be something internal - once liquor was available and parents weren’t, some people did the drunk thing from time to time and a small few couldn’t stop themselves from doing it on a regular basis.
That’s something that never made sense to me about connecting the drinking age to school level. Schools have all different cut-off dates , everywhere from June 1 to December 31. Where I live , the public schools and Catholic schools have a cut off date of December 31 so that close to half of the HS graduating class will be 17 and half 18 on graduation day. So there will be 18 year olds in HS and 17 year olds in college without even accounting for repeated grades or skipped grades or the Jan 10 birthdate who starts school a year early in a private school. ( There was a 21 year old in my high school class- he had been a senior for a few years already)