Its the gaming, YouTube, and social media. Before all this, kids were bored and had to get together for entertainment. Then they were bored together and came up with bad ideas of what to do.

A good amount of the drinking in high school is to ease social anxiety when being in a large group and not knowing what to do. When they are in gaming groups, they know what to do because they playing something. Its stupid but it has a purpose to them. Getting drunk doesn't help their game performance.

I graduated high school in 1982 in southern California.

My youth was a varient on Dazed and Confused, without the weird paddling thing but with the drinking, parties, going to nightclubs and concernts starting at age 14, and some harder drugs (Quaaludes back when they were still available, LSD, mushrooms, etc.)

College was tame compared to my high school experiences and I am the only one of my high school friend group that went to a solid University and grad school. Raised UMC but with oblivious parents (who are lovely people, they were just completely clueless). I am very lucky that I was generally pretty smart and had family that pushed (and paid) for college.

I have a teen starting high school and a tween and they are both good kids that (I hope) are on a very different path from where I was, I agree the drugs are stronger and the consequences can be much more severe now and neither I nor DH are as oblivious as my parents were.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They’re using pills instead. less messy and easier to hide.

You act like Gen X'ers did not pop pills.

We drank cough syrup with codeine

we sure did

Slightly tangential question. Am I the only idiot on here who actually tried to smoke banana peels?

It me. And did you try to make LSD with morning glory seeds? Little did I know that set me up with a lifelong interest and career not as a drugged out loser but a PhD in organic chemistry

I didn't actually try, but I read about it. I'm a researcher now.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My teens do not party, but they also are not wholesome.

Vaping
Sex
Social media

They find trouble, just different trouble

when you vape marijuana you can't smell it like the 80s.

Exactly, but they aren't going to parties to do it. They can vape anywhere, alone, Facetiming, etc.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They’re using pills instead. less messy and easier to hide.

You act like Gen X'ers did not pop pills.

We drank cough syrup with codeine

we sure did

Slightly tangential question. Am I the only idiot on here who actually tried to smoke banana peels?

It me. And did you try to make LSD with morning glory seeds? Little did I know that set me up with a lifelong interest and career not as a drugged out loser but a PhD in organic chemistry

Oh my gosh, that's wonderful - also, I would totally read that memoir!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They’re using pills instead. less messy and easier to hide.

You act like Gen X'ers did not pop pills.

We drank cough syrup with codeine

we sure did

Somehow I had the impression this was just something a group of idiot boys in my high school had come up with on their own. Color me surprised to discover it was an actual thing!

Although I think they were just drinking entire bottles of over-the-counter Robitussin, not the good stuff with the codeine.

How old are you cough syrup folks? Younger GenX? I don't remember cough syrup being a thing and I graduated HS in 1991. We had plenty of booze, pot, and other drugs...but not cough syrup

1991 here, as well

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They’re using pills instead. less messy and easier to hide.

You act like Gen X'ers did not pop pills.

We drank cough syrup with codeine

we sure did

Slightly tangential question. Am I the only idiot on here who actually tried to smoke banana peels?

PP here - we tried to smoke oregano but not banana peels. We did snort pixie sticks and it hurt and was no fun. (I actually was never much of a drug user outside of smoking pot with friends, despite the oregano, pixie sticks, and cough syrup.)

They don’t party less. They’re just smarter about it. Drugs can be concealed as candy, vaping weed, and yes pills. Sometimes their parents pills or a friends pills.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They’re using pills instead. less messy and easier to hide.

You act like Gen X'ers did not pop pills.

We drank cough syrup with codeine

we sure did

Somehow I had the impression this was just something a group of idiot boys in my high school had come up with on their own. Color me surprised to discover it was an actual thing!

Although I think they were just drinking entire bottles of over-the-counter Robitussin, not the good stuff with the codeine.

How old are you cough syrup folks? Younger GenX? I don't remember cough syrup being a thing and I graduated HS in 1991. We had plenty of booze, pot, and other drugs...but not cough syrup

PP here: I graduated in '90. I went to high school in a smallish city in the South, so maybe we just didn't have the same options as big-city kids did? But I'd just always assumed it was limited to that one group of morons who either decided drinking alone wasn't doing it for them anymore, or just figured it was easier to get a case of generic robitussin from Wal-Mart than to find someone to buy them beer.

OMG, I was so so bad in HS. My best friend was the youngest of 6 and her Mom was totally checked out. We used to go to college bars and drink & dance all night. Everyone in my friend group was drinking heavily and partying like rock stars. I was somehow able to keep my virginity until college which I threw off almost immediately my freshman year of college. Maybe even the first month with the first halfway decent looking frat guy!

Anonymous wrote:I think the consequences of wild behavior are so much worse now—I wasn’t wild at all in high school but get my FH and his brother and his best friend from high school together and they have some crazy stories. “Borrowing” a parent’s Porsche and driving to California without having licenses. A neighborhood being taken to the hospital via helicopter for alcohol poisoning. Fights, parties, more alcohol and drugs, etc.

My in-laws weren’t particularly attentive parents, DH was the third boy, but a lot of what happened back then the cops would just turn kids over to their parents, say it’s just kids being kids, and nobody who wasn’t there would even hear about it. Now there would be arrests, suspension, expulsion, news and social media.

+1

I’m a GenXer and my friends really didn’t party in HS, and the kids I went to college with had not partied a lot on HS either. I got the impression in College that the rich prep school kids had partied a lot more (which school was it where the kids charters a jet to fly them to Columbia to buy coke in bulk??). Even in my rinky dink hometown it was the rich high school that had the reputation of being the partying school. At my middle income high school, the kids going to college didn’t really party—some of the ones that were not planning on college were possibly stoned a lot (or maybe
they were just very relaxed, since they weren’t worried about
their grades).

Yup. Proud Gen Xer, here. My bff’s boyfriend was in the service and bought us all the liquor we could drink and more. We had co-ed sleepovers and drank our faces off. Those were the days. My entire parenting ethos has been to help my kid avoid all that and I have done well.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have two kids in high school, and I can't get over how "wholesome" teens seem to be now compared to how they used to be. When I was my kids' age, it seemed like a lot more kids drank, smoked, got high, dated/had sex, were out late on weekends going off with their friends, etc. Now it seems like that's relatively rare, when I tell my kids some of the things that I did at their ages, (and I wasn't a wild kid) they are pretty shocked. I know that there are some kids who still do some of the things that I mentioned, but they seem like their the "bad" kids, whereas when I was that age, it was pretty much the norm. Do other Generation X parents notice this as well?

AIDS, M.A.D.D. and "just say no" seem to have worked. But I 100% agree with you.

Sure but now they can buy pot to vape for $30 and it has 300 hits... 300!!!!

Anonymous wrote:Depending on age (1980 would be younger than me, for example) many of us came up on the heels of "the 60's" but before AIDS and Nancy Reagan kicked in. The drinking age in DC was 18 - you saw from the kavanaugh hearings what it was like to be a teen here. Just a different time, but I fear for kids who have never experimented getting into this stuff for the first time while in college.

Yea the date rape scene back then was worse than now.