when would you let a teen spend a night alone at home?

[Anonymous]

11:51 here. I picked up my friends and drove them into the garage. I dropped off friends who couldn't spend the night back at their homes or they carpooled with other sober friends. Amazingly, most of my friends in high school were pretty good about having designated drivers .. and there was a safe rides program in our town you could always call if you needed a ride no questions asked. Homecoming night I was the designated driver and had 8 friends in my parent's minivan.

A few additional people did show up uninvited but somehow my neighbors did not notice (and they were supposed to be keeping an eye out on me !!!).

[Anonymous]

You know 22:08, it seems to me that your parents were right to trust you alone in the house while they were away. You sound like you really had your head on straight, were pretty responsible. Yeah, you had a party, but you showed maturity in having it. Good training for college, when there wouldn't be anyone watching you at all.

[Anonymous]

We also have a very responsible high school DS and had a similar situation come up last year; we had planned a ski trip over Pres Day weekend, but he wanted to stay home and work on a paper. Because he wanted to focus on his schoolwork, he didn't think it would make sense to stay at a friend's house and we agreed. So we discussed the possibility that friends would want to come over and party at our house and how he would handle this. He was very honest and said he wasn't comfortable with the idea of having to tell his friends to leave, so I stayed home and DH went with our younger child. (This wasn't a big deal financially as it was just a driving trip.) As for PPs who've suggested that a high school kid is similar to a college kid in maturity, I would have to differ. While a 20-year-old is still certainly capable of making big errors in judgment, the odds that he/she will do so are much lower than they are for a 16 or 17 y.o. The cognitive and emotional learning curves are very steep in late adolescence/early adulthood.

[Anonymous]

Your child's trustworthiness is almost beside the point -- if word gets out that you are not home, he will be under unmerciful pressure from friends and acquaintances to have a party. If you're lucky, it would be limited to kids he knows, but there is no guarantee of that because word spreads so fast. When kids this age are drinking, they have the judgment of fleas, and they drink a lot very fast, which can lead to life-threatening situations that no one is capable of dealing with because they will all be drinking. If the police are called to the home or a tragedy occurs, you will be financially and criminally liable. You will be doing your son a favor by not asking him to navigate all that.

[Anonymous]

Something tells me that 22:08's mother would not have been so unruffled if she'd heard about the party the week after it took place!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Your child's trustworthiness is almost beside the point -- if word gets out that you are not home, he will be under unmerciful pressure from friends and acquaintances to have a party.

How can you be positive about that? That for all children, this is true?

I'm just thinking about myself as a teenager. If my parents had left for the weekend and left me home alone, I can't think of anyone who would have put any pressure on me to let them show up and drink. We were all nerds, me and all 6 of my friends. Girl Scout, Honors Classes, non drinking, non partying nerds. And, my parents were well aware of that. As it was, they didn't leave me home alone for the weekend because my grandmother lived with us. But honestly, she went to bed at 7 after I cooked her dinner, so I certainly could have had any number of parties, had I wanted to. But I didn't.

Don't you think some other kids would be like that, even in this day and age?

[Anonymous]

OP, let him stay home alone for the weekend. It will be like a test. From the way you described him, it sounds like he will be just fine. This will help give him a little independence while at the same time you will get an idea of how independent/responsible he is on his own.

Pretty soon he will be in college before you know it. It's better to know what he is like on his own (by giving him that weekend alone) then to not know at all before he goes off and is on his own in college.

Please give an update on what you decide. It seems like some of these posters took the movie "Risky Business" to heart.

[Anonymous]

16:16 here. I was also a responsible kid with responsible friends as a teen. My parents gave me leeway and let me go to clubs in DC in high school. (But I wouldn't let my kids do that, personally.) But a home aone is different. I think it will be fine.

[Anonymous]

I have two teenagers who talk to me very frankly and who are very good kids, but do drink -- fortunately, not as excessively as many of them do. Every possibility I mention above has happened in their cohort, in both public and private schools, several times in the last year or so. I have been present at several parties, twice because the police were called by neighbors and parents were called to pick up their kids. Believe me, while there are always some kids who bravely try to make it through high school without drinking, the vast majority of them do, and they often do it differently than our generation did. Multiple shots in a very short period of time are common, as is beer pong and other drinking games. Starting at about 8th grade, I made sure my kids knew how much alcohol the body could safely process per hour and what signs to look for in friends that might have alcohol poisoning.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have two teenagers who talk to me very frankly and who are very good kids, but do drink -- fortunately, not as excessively as many of them do.

Wow, PP! If I had two high school kids who drank alcohol, and who had friends who drank as much as you describe, there's no way I'd let them stay home alone without adut supervision. So I guess you really do need to know your kids, and their freinds, before contemplating something like this!

I'm the self-descibed nerd poster from before. My high school was full of party-hardy kids, from middle school on. My friends and I just weren't among them.

[Anonymous]

As the mom of a teen, I think the posters whose children are younger need to understand that technology has changed the adolescent social scene in very fundamental ways. The biggest change is that news spreads faster and farther. So, the news that there's a house available for parties with no parents around can very easily go beyond your child's immediate circle of friends, whom you might know and consider trustworthy, to kids you've never met and whom your child barely knows.

[Anonymous]

Exactly right. And even the best kids may experiment when given the opportunity -- which is why they need to know the hazards.

[Anonymous]

What about your 18 year old college freshman? Would you let him stay alone at your house overnight?

[Anonymous]

It does get complicated, doesn't it? They're certainly old enough at that point and presumably you've come to some sort of understanding about drinking since they're on their own so much anyway. But I will say that my college kid told me about several parties over Christmas, all held in homes where the parents were away, that sounded like bacchanals. So I'm thinking if you know there won't be a party because your son's friends aren't all around or because he can withstand the pressure to have one, fine -- otherwise, you risk kids sleeping together in all your beds, doing drugs, drinking excessively underage, and throwing up all over your house.

[Anonymous]

No. I was nerd/goody goody in high school but as soon as my parents left me and my brother alone one weekend, I threw a party. We even threw the trash (empty bottles) in the woods in my neighborhood. Yeah, very dumb and irresponsible. I still can't believe I did that.