Parents have less control over kids than when I was young. Even if a parent says to a kid, "don't drink before you're 16," the parent has little power to enforce it.In addition, I don't think that kids view their parents as being authority figures as much as when I was a teen-ager. (That's not entirely a bad thing because parents aren't always right.) Parent's can't do the job of controlling juvenile drinking and so the state has to step in to reduce the risk the kid will cause harm by drinking. at a young age. It would be better if parents did it, but unfortunately that's not the world we live in.
P.S. I hope I didn't sound too much like an old man yelling at a cloud!
I don't think you sounded like an old man yelling at a cloud at all. Nothing wrong with making observations or citing opinions.
The drinking age was raised to 21 before I started drinking. That didn't stop me or just about every kid I knew from drinking all through HS. Even the kids of cops in town would drink. So I'm not sure how much the drinking age is adhered to, then or now.
We never really tried to "control" our kids, per se. We tried to set examples and express rules and limits, especially when the kids were young. But as they got older, we gave them more choices and more responsibility, at younger ages than most parents around us, apparently.
For example, once they reached HS, my kids had no bedtimes nor did I wake them up in the morning. They were responsible for waking themselves up, and getting themselves to school or work or wherever on time. And they knew that, if they were late, it was on them, would affect them, not us parents.
Another example is that homework and studying was entirely on them, too. Do it, don't do it, it was their future and other than explaining the impacts, I never nagged or checked. I was available to help if asked, that was it.
In my kid's cases, that approach worked out well. All turned out to be very responsible.
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