Do you lock your liquor/wine and beer away?
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Anonymous
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Not when DD was in high school because she was a straight arrow. When younger DS entered junior year, it became necessary. The alcohol is in my closet.
I know kids will experiment, I did myself. But I don't believe in making it easy, wink wink, for them. To me, even passively facilitating their drinking sends the wrong signals. Teens are stupid, don't make it easier to be stupid. |
Anonymous
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No, but if he didn't detest alcohol, I would. No reason to tempt.
(I highly doubt that a kid who won't take a sip of beer when offered, or order a drink for himself when we travel is going to bother to help himself) |
Anonymous
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Not if they're just home alone because they've never given me a reason to, but I do if they're going to be home alone with a friend over.
All of the drinking I did as a teen was at the house of my friend whose parents entertained a lot and didn't lock up their alcohol. My parents weren't drinkers and only had wine in the house around Thanksgiving & Christmas and some beer for the Super Bowl. My parents would have definitely noticed if some was gone because we had so little. My friends parents had TONS and never knew. Sometimes we'd just finish a bottle during a sleepover and not even worry about refilling it, there was that much alcohol at their bar. |
Anonymous
If you had alcoholism in the family, and a child with risk factors for drug abuse, you would have a different view. |
Anonymous
No. |
Anonymous
Been wondering the same. We have the liquor cart like everyone else that we rarely touch. It's for entertaining others. We likely wouldn't notice minor missing amounts or replacements--at least not immediately. An occasional beer in the fridge but that's rare. What we DO have is wine. A LOT of wine. Expensive wine. In built-in wine shelves in the lower level of the house where we just couldn't "lock" it away and/or where there isn't a door that could be locked etc. DD is only 12 but we've definitely had convos where we have explained house rules about expectations that none of it is to be touched. She's a great kid. Very responsible/trustworthy. But hey, every kid has lapses of judgement. And also I realize that she's young and maybe my assessment of her will change as she ages. DH and I keep talking about what to do. He doesn't want to do anything. I worry about the consequences of not doing it. Although honestly the only thing we could reasonably do at this point with our wine collection is to pay to rent a 3rd party wine storage facility.  We probably have a couple hundred bottles. They're pretty well organized but to suggest that we'd notice if ONE went missing is far-fetched. What do folks do about their wine shelves???
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Anonymous
Do you have alcoholism in the family, and a child with risk factors for drug abuse? |
Anonymous
Wine is easy. You hide all the wine openers in your tampon or underwear drawer. Unless you are buying Boones Strawberry Hill screw top, wine is difficult for people, even adults, to open. No corkscrew, no wine. |
Anonymous
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When I was 13 I was at a neighbor friend's house one weekday after school. No parents. A classmate of hers stopped by with a few kids we didn't know well, asking to pick up something for a school project. Long story short one of those kids swiped a bottle of vodka out of the liquor cabinet, which we found out when the police showed up that night. The kid who swiped the vodka had proceeded to drink almost the entire bottle and was hauled off to the hospital that evening. It was a horrible, frightening situation and my friend and I were interrogated at length and got in a lot of trouble, as did her parents. No one was arrested but there was a lot of blame coming from multiple directions.
A hell of a lot can go wrong when adolescents have access to drugs and/or alcohol. Some people may think their kids are above temptation, and maybe they are, but you still need to consider all those other teenagers who may ever set foot in your house. |
Anonymous
| No, we do not lock up anything or put anything away. The liquor is kept in the liquor cabinet, the wine in the its place, medicines are in the appropriate medicine cabinets. We -do- and always have talked about substance abuse and the dangers of different substances. And, when examples have presented themselves, we have talked about things like alcoholism. So when there were drunk parents at a tee-ball game, we talked about it later with the kids. Or all the recent articles in the paper about drug use have been worked into conversations. That kind of thing. So far so good as far as it working for us. |
Anonymous
All very functional. |
Anonymous
I don't know what that means, but my parents were alcoholics (high-functioning) and one of my siblings is a recovering alcoholic. I have a niece who spent months in an inpatient addiction recovery program. Given that, I do keep alcohol under tight control. I also talk to my kids a lot about alcohol, educate them about their family history and the effects of alcohol on the developing brain, and set and enforce expectations. I do everything I can to guard against alcohol abuse. I see no benefit in taking risks, and a lot of potential downside. |
Anonymous
Same as high-functioning, though nobody use the term, pretty much everyone is a drinker. There are couple of relatives, who don't drink. I don't talk about drinking (it's useless as I will be drinking while talking about it), but we do talk about dangerous situations that can happen because of drinking (plenty of examples around). It is interesting, though, I was drinking much more than my kids when I was a teenager. |
Anonymous
From my kids, no. From visiting adolescents, yes. |
Anonymous
Yep. |