From the day your child is born, you dream big dreams and hope the best for them. You desire to give them a better upbringing than you had and you fret about how you're going to provide it. You hope they won't make the same mistakes you did and you agonize when they do. You go the distance to get them a great education, to live in a safe neighborhood, to enrich them with social and cultural experiences, and to develop their athletic and artistic potential.
Great. Now what about their character?
It's surprising how many parents will instinctively respond to the question, "What do you want for your child?" by saying, "I just want them to be happy" without fully realizing the trade-off that could entail. Would you be satisfied if your kids grew up to be wealthy, well-educated, well-traveled, and even happy, but lacked the qualities of integrity, morality, honesty, trustworthiness, and empathy that constitute what we know as character?Great. Now what about their character?
It all begs the question: where is "good enough" when it comes to raising kids? Somehow we've devalued character and morality (if we ever truly did value them) to the point that if you just have the outward appearance of success or affluence or niceness, then inner qualities don't matter. Forgive me, but that is so California. And it is so bankrupt. I'm not saying that perfect character is or ought to be the goal, only that we've ceded far too much in the area of character development, so much so that young people could be excused for believing that there are no standards, and that in any case, it would be impolite and wrong to judge.
What set me thinking about all of this is news that the City of Mission Viejo is considering passing a "social host" ordinance which would hold parents liable when teens consume alcohol at their homes. The proposed law came about because teenage weekend house parties are rampant there (it's the O.C., after all) and other jurisdictions have had success in fining the owner of the property when alcohol is illegally consumed there. (I've since learned that in San Diego County, only Carlsbad and Del Mar do not have such an ordinance on the books.)
Want to discover someone's attitude about what a parent can and ought to do when it comes to communicating values and expectations and providing moral guidance? Start a discussion on the issue of whether parents should be held ultimately accountable for the behavior of their kids. The ordinance came up on talk radio recently, and a man who said he was the dad of two teenage boys weighed in with this:
"I have two teenagers myself and I've had a couple of parties for them myself...I take their keys, I monitor the party, and if someone's getting out of control, they're done...Just a small, closed group of friends over here, havin' a good time, they like to play 'Beer Pong' - what they call it - you know, and - if a parent is going to have a party, they have to be responsible about it."
From the outset, this dad betrays his own ignorance. For those of you who don't know, let me enlighten you about "Beer Pong". You set up cups of beer, usually in a triangle shape (think bowling pins), at opposite ends of a table and take turns bouncing or tossing a ping pong ball at the other team's cups. Ball in a cup = opposing team has to drink that cup. Once all of the cups have been drained, the losing side customarily has to drink whatever beer remains on the winning side. The goal is to get the other team to drink a lot of beer, fast. In other words, if you were - as this dad is apparently claiming - trying to teach kids how to responsibly enjoy alcohol, "Beer Pong" would be a poor method to use.
Moreover, as the dad continued it became evident he really had no idea how much the kids were consuming, nor did he care to know, because nobody was going to be leaving: "They all spend the night. I usually have about 7 or 8 couples, you know, that's about it, no more than 20 at the most." (You read that right - "couples". To which the host asked, "How do you know they're not groping each other?" and the father responded, "Well I don't know that, but they're teenagers, you know, it's gonna happen anywhere.")
Then the dad said, "But I don't let the kids get, you know, crazy drunk." (Drunk is apparently ok, just not "crazy drunk".) "Just like a bartender should...if they're getting to a point where they're way too drunk or they're - before that, you gotta stop 'em."
They say if you give someone enough rope, they'll hang themselves, and sure enough, the man's real rationale came through as he prattled on:
"Well, I've got - my boys are pretty good, you know? They've got a great group of friends, they all get good grades, they're all in sports, you know, they all do the right thing. They're not troublemakers." Then he hastened to add, "I don't tolerate any drugs. No drugs at all. You know, if I see that, they're gone."
At this point, allow me to translate:
"My boys and I have a bargain. I am their dad, and they know the thing I care about most is image, keeping up with the Joneses, but also being a cool dad. Really, I just want them to be happy. I like their friends, and their friends like me, and we've pretty much worked it out so that as long as no one makes waves (no drugs, no "crazy drunk" stuff), everything's chill. As long as they keep getting good grades and don't embarrass me, like by dropping out of sports and dressing all in black or something, I'll appease them by providing alcohol and hosting co-ed sleepovers at our house."
Well. A full consideration of this matter wouldn't be complete if I didn't also share with you the thoughts of another caller to the same show, this one from the opposite end of the age spectrum. The girl, who said she was 23, chimed in, "What better way to teach kids healthy drinking habits other than in their own home, I mean, kids are going to get drunk anyways, whether or not you fine their parents, but why not keep them at home and keep them safe?" Monitoring parties, "is harm reduction, you know? We can't prevent it, that's been proven: kids die every day in drunk-driving accidents, but why not keep it at the home and show them how to drink?" (She didn't say whether Beer Pong would be part of that curriculum.)
The point - in part - is that kids are not interested in being taught how to drink. Illicitness and overdoing it is part of the appeal of underage drinking to those who are underage. They get drunk because "you never know what might happen" as opposed to light social drinking that accompanies some other event. Here's a newsflash: Teenagers don't have parties so they can get together and catch up on old times. At teenage house parties, drinking is the event.
But the point is also bigger than underage drinking alone. The point is that no one seriously believes that parents have no authority or that there ought to be no standard, whether it's "no drugs" or "no getting crazy drunk" or "no drinking and driving". Everyone implicitly recognizes that parents have a right to, well, be parents, to put their foot down and draw a line and say, "Here is where I stand, and as my son or daughter, this is the standard that you will be held to." The question isn't as simple as whether the drinking age should be lowered or abolished (as some would have you believe) because even then, a parent would have to set limits - "Mom, why can't I go to the bar on Mondays?" The question is where will you stake out those boundaries of character development?
Underage drinking is an issue of character because of the often-ignored fact that it is illegal and as long as it remains illegal it will involve deception. Kids have to lie about where they're going and where they've been, they have to lie about their age or pay someone who will lie if questioned about why they're buying the booze, they have to lie about whether so-and-so's parents will be home, and they have to clean up beer stains and get rid of the trash so they aren't found out - and I have never known a busted teenager to be honest about how much they actually drank and not claim to have been surprised that alcohol was there ("It just sort of showed up").
Or, it need not involve (much) deception if they're friends of that Orange County dad, who presumes to decide for himself that that law need not be followed. Which in turn brings us back to the female caller, who opined: "Adults have a lot of influence. I grew up here and I went to a lot of parties and I watched a lot of my friends die in drunk driving accidents and it's unfortunate, but they never told us what to do if we got in trouble. It was always, 'Say no, say no, don't drink'; never 'don't drink and drive' or 'eat before you drink', there was never any of that."
Catch the doublespeak? "Adults have a lot of influence" - yet she chose to ignore the messages they were giving: "Say no...don't drink." I don't know why those messages didn't penetrate (but she did hear them, didn't she?), but her prescription is horrible. Enabling kids is not guiding them. Surrender is not a strategy. Responsible parenting is not advising kids to drink on a full stomach. That's not the point. The point is to do the right thing. Do it over and over. As caregivers of children, you have the right and responsibility to stake out the moral boundaries of those living under your care. (And yes, kids will develop and define their own moral boundaries, and one day they'll get to test them, and to see if they're practical and wise. But not while they live under your roof.) As I've written before, you absolutely have the right to hold kids to a higher standard than you yourself may have met. Without this idealism, our collective morality races to the bottom.
Ultimately, a social host ordinance can slap fines on overly accommodating parents, it can deter teenage drinking in homes, it can cause parents who've foolishly trusted their kids to mind the house for the weekend to be smarter; but it cannot give parents the fortitude to stop caving into the culture. Only the culture itself, or a force within the culture, can stem that tide. Parental idealism is one of those forces. It has pushed our kids to higher and higher levels of academic, athletic, and creative achievement. So why can't that idealism be brought to bear on our kids' character, too?
