Banner Headline: Teenagers Drink Alcohol

By Alicia Dorr in News on Jul 23, 2007 6:09PM

Call us pragmatic (or call us a ninny, if you like), but we don't really think that teenagers are going to stop drinking alcohol anytime soon. That's why we were not at all surprised when we read that three of the teens who were at that Deerfield party where the parents may have known kids were drinking were just arrested for — you guessed it — drinking.

Probably due to the fact that their underdeveloped brains, filled with judgment-clouding hormones, didn't see the risk in walking out of a house with alcohol less than two days after those parents were found guilty, the three 19-year-olds have a court date coming up. We don't feel bad for them at all, nor do we think it's a good idea for a bunch of teens to get drunk and drive around. Or walk around. Or be around one another.

However, we think it's a totally B.S. teetotaler mentality that assumes the problem of teen drinking can be solved by denying alcohol from kids entirely, or upping force from the authorities. We don't have enough fingers to count the number of former high school classmates we know whose parents didn't let them drink, or who didn't because they "chose" not to, that became raging binge drinkers the moment they left home. And that is the end result time after time after time, because, like where school systems stop teaching real sex ed and end up with the highest pregnancy rates in the nation, it's not fixing the problem at its most basic level.

Even youths who don't see it in their home see it everywhere, elsewhere. If a teenager sees their parents, older siblings, teachers and others base their time around alcohol or, at very least, consume it regularly — and no one talks to them about it honestly — how can they ever learn anything different?

Image via studio8.net.