Parenting Pearl #6: "Arrest the Parents"

Jeanie Smith, blog author Marcy's mother, and Mary

Recently my local public radio station's Question of the Day was: Should parents be held responsible if guests of their kids drink?

So this got me to wondering--how much parental responsibility are we (as a society) willing to legislate? As a Licensed Parent Educator, I know that it is infinitely easier to sit around a table with other parents, drinking coffee, and talk about what to do in challenging situations than to be in the heat of the moment and follow through on what you said you were going to do earlier in the day. Along my own parenting journey, I learned that it was absolutely futile to worry about what the 'other' parents were doing and hope that would change in support of what I thought was the right way to handle a situation. My husband and I finally settled on, "In our house, we..." I'd like to tell you that made all those brutally tough circumstances easier in that the kids got it when I'd say, "In our house, we enforce a curfew" and that their response was, "Yes, of course in our house we enforce a curfew. Thank you! A lesson in life learning! Where would I be without you to enforce this curfew? As a matter of fact, how about if I come home earlier than the curfew, Mother Dearest?"

It wasn't.

Back to the drinking issue. Ours was not the home where the teenagers gathered. As Maggie once told me when I tried to convince her to bring her friends to our house after a high school dance, "You have rules." It was really hard to know that my kids were going to homes where the rules were decidedly more lenient, if there were rules. Or that the rules were along the lines of, "Naturally we take the kids' keys so they can't drink and drive." Or, "We supply the alcohol so we can limit the amount they consume." Spoken with all the sincerity of one who truly believed this was the right thing to do.

Common sense looks different to different people. So much goes into its formation, shaping, adjustment. But when society has established a rule of law, i.e. drinking is illegal until you are 21, should society then legislate "common sense?"

This is such an interesting topic, because it's one that I can honestly see both sides of. Obviously, I'm a lot of years, like at least 4, away from dealing with this particular issue. But I can see that down the line, parents have to figure out where they stand on this one.

I have friends and acquaintances who fall down on the lenient side here. They provide the place for the underage partying to happen so they can "keep an eye on things."And there is some validity to that argument, I guess. When I think about how scary it is to imagine my child drinking, then getting in a car and driving around for fun, I can see why parents want to buy the booze and keep the kids at home. At least that way, you limit the things that can go seriously, majorly wrong.

Myself, though, I think there's just a bit more validity to the stricter side of this debate. I have two major reasons for this opinion. The first is purely logistical. My husband and I are both educators. If ours is the house that supplies alcohol to underage kids, we're in danger of losing our jobs and our entire careers, not to mention creating a local scandal and giving our respective school districts really bad images. The second is philosophical. The law is the law, and I think it's important to teach my children that you don't get a lot of leeway in how you choose to follow it. Clearly, there are people who have broken the law for really good reasons and part of teaching moral character is learning when the law is simply wrong. But, c'mon, giving 17-year-olds beer doesn't make you Rosa Parks.

Where do you all stand on this one? Do we hold the parents responsible? And what is the responsible thing to do in these types of situations? We love to hear your feedback! Leave us a comment or take the survey right now.