A drink, but never intoxicated. In fact, I routinely point out intoxicated idiots in so-called family friendly places to my son so he gets the idea. 
To me (no, I’m not Shakes, but since I said something similar…), I have a very low threshhold where I feel no longer safe to drive. Probably long before I hit the legal limit, actually. If I have 2 drinks in 2 hours, I’m much happier handing my keys to someone else. I could certainly pass a roadside sobriety test; I’m not slurring or stumbling, but I just don’t feel safe driving. What can I say, I’m a child of the MADD generation, and the message is pounded deep into me: don’t drink and drive. Period.
There’s a couple more drinks between that point and “Oh…wow, the room got spinny for a moment when I stood up too fast.”, which is where I put “buzzed” or “lightly drunk.” I can still order a pizza, even if I’m at an unfamiliar address, and if the cops show up, I can have a reasonable conversation to mollify them, but driving is absolutely, positively out of the question, even in an emergency.
Sloppy drunk is a couple of drinks past that, when I’m stumbling, slurring words and telling people I love them, man. That’s definitely the point the kids don’t need to see me at until they’re of legal drinking age themselves, if ever.
Drinking and being drunk are two different things. To this day I think at least some of my aversion to ever being drunk comes from watching my dad and my dad’s friends getting drunk at parties and humiliating themselves in front of everyone.
That makes sense.
I very rarely drink; maybe three times in a year. My oldest daughter never really saw me drink until she was a teenager and she would act like I was an alcoholic just for having a few drinks one time. She was very much against alcohol up until she hit 21. Now she has an extensive bar in her room and I get to tease her every time I am in there.
I don’t think I would get drunk with my little girl around. She knows about grown-up drinks because of her sister’s bar, but I couldn’t enjoy a buzz with her bouncing around. I’d be too nervous. Sometimes after she goes to bed, very rarely I might have a drink or three.
Did I read this right? You drank the alcohol equivalent of 16 beers, and you’re thinking it’s weird for her to be uncomfortable with that?
Unless you’re joking, that’s a crazy amount of liquor to drink in a single session.
I can drive after having one drink, but I’d be very wary of driving after having two drinks. I’ve never built up a tolerance for alcohol.
So when my daughter turned 16 and got her driver’s license, I told her that if I had a drink when we went out, that I’d prefer for her to drive home. And we’re both OK with that.
I grew up when babies had whiskey rubbed on their gums for teething pains. My father, a first generation Sicilian American, grew up drinking wine when he was a kid (his dad was a rumrunner during Prohibition), and he thought it was normal for kids to have some watered wine for Sunday dinner. We all had to get dressed in good clothes (no blue jeans or Tshirts) and eat Sunday dinner in the formal dining room, instead of in the breakfast nook, which was where most meals were eaten. I’m sure that this built character, but at the time, I regarded it as him being a stick in the mud, as usual.
My daughter grew up watching me cook with wine, and having a drink now and then. I allowed her to taste my beer and wine, but she never acquired a taste for it, other than in cooking. She doesn’t think that it’s immoral to drink, it’s just that she doesn’t care for it. Now that she has her own place, she does keep wine and some liqueurs around, just to cook with.
So, since I don’t drink much, I don’t mind her seeing me when I DO drink, because I never get more than a bit tipsy.
Pretty much the same here. I was raised in the 70s and 80s as well. (except for the drinking with my parents part)
Not a dad, but I avoid drinking around my nephew. (and nieces when we were in contact)
I not only grew up watching my parents drink, but I could mix a mean Manhattan when I was 8. So there, now I’m the abused child of drunk parents to most of the SD.
The reality was that my parents drank in moderation, just about every night. I can remember them getting slightly tipsy on occasion when they went out with friends, but never at home. Alcohol was just another thing around my house - neither mysterious or particularly dangerous, though you did want to watch out about how much you drank lest you get sick/drunk/hungover/etc.
Heck, for the record, pot was pretty normal around the house. Not from my parents, but I was the youngest child in a family of teenagers in the 70s. I remember watching my siblings get high in their bedrooms when I was maybe 6 or 7. (Just to be clear - my parents knew about none of this, and the shit would have hit the fan had they found out).
And you know what? We all grew up to be decent members of society. None of us are drunks or drug users. We’re married, have kids (well, except me, by choice), and all that.
If anything, I think being around alcohol being used in moderation taught me that it’s not something to get all nutso about. I recall being on a school trip to Europe the summer I was 15, and there were several other kids who were much more naive about drinking than I was. Not naive in that they didn’t want to drink, but totally oblivious to the consequences. On more than one occasion over the 2-week period I had to help them get back to the hotel, get in bed, and once even had to take one of the other girls’ contacts out. I’d been drinking as well, but stopped after one or two. They didn’t.
I grew up drinking watered down wine for dinner starting at maybe seven. Sweet wines. I do have one sister who is a recovering alcoholic.
My kids see us drink. We don’t get sloppy drunk around them (we don’t get sloppy drunk).
I don’t drink enough not to be able to drive my kids to the hospital when I’m alone with them. But a cab or an ambulance would work in those circumstances if I did.
How different it is in Japan, where people drink around kids all the time. They have sports days at elementary schools and the fathers will be having beers.
I’ll drink in moderation around the kids, if at all. Never sloppy drunk. 9 times out of 10, I’m the designated driver so I do try to teach them that if someone is planning on driving, they abstain from drinking.
My husband and I have probably had a collective three drinks since our 12 year old son was born. Early in our marriage we had at least one night a week where we’d get more than a little tipsy but then I was trying to lose weight, got pregnant and then was afraid of any impairment around my baby. After than I was no longer interested in alcohol.
To be honest, we see that my brother-in-laws wife drinks too much around the kids and we like to show her up so that’s a motivator not to drink around our son too.
We also tell our son that you should not ever have a drink and then drive. We personally believe this.
Pretty much this. My parents split a bottle of wine at dinner every night during my childhood and I never noticed any effect on their moods, functions or personality. I thought all adults did that. In fact, I thought it was strange when my friends’ parents drank anything else at dinner.
My wife and I drink on the weekends only, and never enough to get drunk- 2-3 glasses of wine or beers throughout the evening, usually. We don’t attempt to hide it from the kids. I think that does more harm than good.
I don’t drink, and I don’t like to be around people who do. If the child is old enough to make responsible decisions (i.e. if you could safely leave him/her alone for a couple of hours) then I suppose it’s OK to have a drink or two.
It is never, never OK to get drunk around a child. You can not predict what might accur to you or what you might do, or how frightening just your walking funny might be to the child.
How much do we drink around our children? Not much. How much do we drink BECAUSE of our children? A lot.
We try to be pretty careful - knowing that one of us NEEDS to be able to care for the kids. Especially when they were babies and needed hands-on assistance. It was just the responsible tack to take. Nowadays, we might both have the equivalent of a beer (he’ll have a beer and I’ll have a hard cider) at the same time. If we had to drive it wouldn’t be ideal, for sure, but I think either of those leaves us “legal” (though if an emergency happened I’d be likely to call 911 vs. driving them).
Now, neither of us is a big drinker anyway so it wasn’t exactly a hardship - and a single drink will make me feel loopy enough that I’d be afraid to drive.
The only time where we’re both perhaps a bit too tipsy to drive would be Thanksgiving - where after a day of cooking, and with a roomful of guests, we’ll relax and enjoy as much wine as we want over the course of the evening. Even then, there’s always at least one guest who’s OK to drive (one friend in particular doesn’t drink at all). The consumption is moderated by the food, and we never get visibly impaired - because that’s not the kind of example we want to set for the kids. Still, I’d rather not drive after the amount we’d have consumed.
When I first saw the subject line, my thinking was you meant “do you let your kids SEE you drinking” and that’s another story. We, for a long time, VERY rarely drank around the kids. And of course the kids got a lot of the “alcohol is a BAD THING” at school. Rarely, Typo Knig would enjoy a beer with dinner while the kids looked on in shock and **Dweezil **glowered and said “Don’t you know ALCOHOL IS A DRUG!” on one occasion, and grumbled “I’m from a family of alcoholics!” on another.
We managed not to laugh (I think), and decided it was time to educate the kids on the difference between enjoying a single drink on occasion, and being a full-on alcoholic. As well as using it for a teaching point, to discuss the difference, and how even someone who wasn’t really an alkie might on occasion drink too much and do really regrettable things (with examples from things we’d seen in our college days).
I grew up in a moderate drinking house hold ( Irish/catholic. Drinking was one thing you could do without guilt, even then they really didn’t get bent.)
I’m not much of a drinker, but I don’t want my kids to be warped to think that all alcohol = evul. I personally don’t like letting go of control like that.
We go to a friends cottage up north where drinking all day is de riguer (not sloppy drunk. Not even slurred drunk. Just enough where you cannot drive the car if the kids break their fool necks on the hammock of death.) and going out to a sand bar on the lake with a hundred pontoon boats anchored in the shallows for a PG-13 -lite R rating of Skankfest can really open their eyes to moderate to dumbass drinking ideas. ( And skanktastic chicks and dbag guys strutting their stuff during mating season. It’s pretty awesome in its redneck view Bad tattoos, boob jobs, fake and bakes: it’s got it all.) It is anthropology and evolution at it’s finest. ( in reverse.)
Our logic is that we are taking them to the human zoo at cocktail hour so that by the time they go off to college and all the other kids are rushing like escaped lunatics that first few weekends to drink themselves into oblivion, our kids ( about 20+ in total) will go, " Meh, seen it. I’m not such a dumbass." the oldest in the group is a senior in college and she cannot believe the shit students do every weekend for so-called fun. (She’s our weekend bartender when she is up at the cottage. We are training her younger brother to take over when she goes off to the Cold Cruel World.)
RE: drinking and driving:
I don’t even drink and drive after a beer. My son has picked up on this - alcohol is for grown-ups and sometimes grown-ups act like children with it.
I totally get drunk and act like an idiot on occasion, but there’s a time and a place for that: parties, bars, public transportation at nighttime…