Actually, nothing. Everything went quite right.
While my wife Amy and I were out celebrating my birthday and our anniversary with dear friends, our oldest Beatrice had thrown herself a belated Halloween birthday party with her good friends (some of whom were the kids of our friends). Bea planned it all, from the decor to the food to the activities. It was quite the production. Amy helped her out with the food before we went out, and I helped a little as well, including decorating for Halloween outside prior to the party because Beatrice loves Halloween. Our youngest Bryce loves their sister but wanted nothing to do with all the teens in our house, so instead spent the night at her best friend's house.
What's great is that Beatrice is taking a culinary class this semester in high school and is learning a lot about food, cooking, and presentation. From a cemetery spinach dip to mummy dogs to ghost pizza and strawberries to spider Oreos, she really had quite the spread for her friends.
What was missing thankfully were the alcohol and drugs. That's not a joke either. Zero interest from our kids and their friends as far as we know. No vaping either. Nothing. However, when Amy and I were 16 and 17, we had many friends who drank, smoked, and did various drugs. We did as well, although I didn't try alcohol until I was 18 during my senior year. And shortly after high school I started smoking cigarettes. I smoked a pack a day for much of that time until I quit on September 22, 2002.
But the drinking was common during our teenage years and early adulthood. My sister and I threw many parties at house when our parents were away (which they always knew). We were literally like all the 1980's teen coming of age movies personified. Amy had similar party times as a teenager, too. I was also in a fraternity in college and there was always lots of drinking going on.
Decades later during the pandemic, many parents we knew who drank moderately prior to covid upped their ante on drinking. We were no exceptions. But then Amy stopped drinking just over three years ago, and I drink less frequently overall, even periodically debating about stopping drinking all together myself.
According to a new survey released by Gallup in the summer, only 54 percent of Americans now say they drink alcohol. That’s the lowest share since Gallup began tracking the question way back in 1939, six years after Prohibition was repealed.
Wow. That's down quite a bit, but humans have been drinking alcoholic drinks in some capacity for thousands of years, brewing beer, fermenting wine, and creating other distilled concoctions. The more recent conventional wisdom that moderate drinking is okay and can be good for you, like red wine, just isn't correct. It turns out that the World Health Organization reported "no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health". Then there are the devastating effects of addiction and alcoholism on the addict directly and their family and friends.
The good news is that, besides the dip in overall alcohol consumption, it's even more dramatic for teens, with some recent data suggesting that alcohol, tobacco, and other drug usage has been declining significantly since the late 1990s.
That's why it's funny when our kids joke with us and say things like "I'm going to host two parties while you're gone", which Beatrice really said but no other teen ever said (unless it was a Tupperware party). Or, "We're going to find our stoner friends and tell them we'd like to buy one drug, please", which was funny coming from sardonic Bryce when I asked what they were going to do with their best friend when they spent the night. But no, no stoner friends, and no drugs or alcohol. And we check in regularly with them, too.
Beatrice's Halloween "adulting" birthday bash was a big hit without the bad stuff. Maybe in the future they'll try something, but today they don't. These dry kids today with their culinary skills and safer and stronger social bonds. Mercy me, maybe we should be modeling them instead.
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