Cocktail Hour With The Children
By
on
November 10th, 2006
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I don't know how I missed yesterday's article in NYT about parents drinking alcohol around their kids. I blame it on the time difference. When the afternoon stuff is posted on U.S. sites I'm busy putting the kids to sleep, and drinking some wine. Stacy Lu talks about parents drinking with their kids present in her article "Cosmopolitan Moms" and the opinions are heated. She talks about a group of parents who regularly get together, have a few drinks, chat about life, and have a good time. While their kids are playing nearby. My only question would be, what the hell are they doing the other days? Don't tell me they go through the whole week without alcohol? I guess you figured out my stand on the whole issue. I think it's entirely appropriate, when done responsibly, to have some drinks around the children.
Head on over to Mike's site Cry It Out if you want a quick peek at what some other sites are saying about mixing alcohol and kids. For me it's all about life balance. Having kids doesn't mean stop living. But I would never use alcohol in way that interferes with my parental duties. Having drinks around the kids, with or without friends, is not bad judgment as long as your doing it the right way. I talk to my kids about everything and that includes alcohol. My experience is the more a parent say no to something, the more interesting it gets. And just imagine what will happen as the teenage years get closer:-) Educating our children and talking to them about what's going on and the right thing to do is how we approach parenthood.
Smoking around children, doing drugs, getting so wasted you can't put the kids to sleep, being loud enough to interfere with their sleep, or having trash hang out around my children is to me irresponsible and will never happen. As is having alcohol while breastfeeding or while pregnant. Or driving after having more than one drink. My wife does have half a glass of wine occasionally, after feeding our daughter, putting her to sleep, and knowing she won't need boobies for the next five hours. That's a compromise we are willing to make. Stereotypes associated with drinking might cause some to believe we all act the same. Getting drunk, angry, and beat up the kids is perhaps what many people think of when alcohol around the kids is mentioned. These people should be in prison, not drinking alcohol.
Mom's everywhere are usually the ones taking care of the children while their husbands work. Here in Sweden things are very different because of the generous parental leave rules. Dad's are likely to also take 6 months off work and spend time with their baby. Whoever takes care of the kids is irrelevant, it's a tremendous amount of work and of course these people need to relax as well. They also want to hang on to life and have fun.
These women are not out to get drunk, they say. And they insist they are not drinking out of need. Rather, they are looking for a small break from the conventions of mommy-hood — a way to hold on to a part of their lives that existed before they had children and to bond over a shared disdain for the almost sadistically stressful world of modern parenting.
This makes perfect sense to me and sounds like a very sensible and responsible approach towards integrating family, children, and fun. Or? You might have stopped by Suburbanbliss at some point. I don't agree with all of Melissa's opinions about life but I think she sums up the situation pretty well in the article.
“What are they going to do, chitchat about the kids for an hour?” Ms. Summers said. “As long as you’re being responsible, I mean, have a glass of wine. When would you need it more than when there’s 40 screaming kids running around?”
Wine recommendation of the year week is the fantastic Seghesio Sonoma Zinfandel. Get the 2002 if you can but the 2004 is also superb. Costs around $20. I'm not a big drinker of Zinfandel but this wine is spectacular. Buying anything less than a case is a sin.
Have a nice weekend!
I agree with you whole heartedly. There is nothing wrong with drinking responsibly around your children. You are showing them how to drink responsibly by setting a good example because that is how you want them to drink when they get older, and most of your kids WILL drink. The prohibitionist anti-alcohol mindset in the United States is out of control. Both the liberal and conservative political parties all love to bash drinking.
Here’s how the cycle works:
- Your parents tell you alcohol is bad, that you should completely abstain from alcohol, and they never drink around you, so you never experience responsible drinking.
- You become a teenager and sneak around drinking with friends learning about alcohol by yourselves. You drink irresponsibly, and do many stupid things.
- You continue to drink irresponsibly and hang around people who drink irresponsibly in college or young adulthood and have many bad experiences with alcohol
- You marry and have children and recall all the bad experiences you had with alcohol and teach your kids alcohol is bad, they must abstain from using alcohol, and never drink around them
- Your kids repeat 1-4 above.
Do you want to break the cycle? Model responsible drinking to your children. Let them take part when they are old enough – but that opens a whole new debate.
I completly agree with you. Me having fun with my friends or going out with my husband or having some wine with dinner at home does not make me a bad mother. One thing that was said by some people who are tlaking about this today is that soem people expect you to stop living when you have kids and I don’t agree with that. My kids are a major part of my life and the most important part, but I am important too and my husband is important and if we don’t take time for us, then how are my kids going to learn what the real world is like?
AD, by the way, your email thinks I’m span…I think it’s because it says the word porn in there, although you wrote it, not me. ;) No actually I think it’s because of the email provider I use.
Nice post, Adventure Dad! One of the things I’ve found now that I’m 36 is that it isn’t even fun to get “loopy” anymore because it takes me about 5 days to recover. Much better to have a beer or two and call it a day. Any time I drink more than I should, I ALWAYS regret it the next day. That was fine back in college, but I don’t have the luxury of sleeping until 4 in the afternoon and doing it all over again. Aw man, that was fun. But you know what? Being a good dad is even more fun. And a beer or two certainly won’t hurt anyone!
While I have never been much of a drinker, having kids put a cramp in ANY type of drinking, because it required me to ‘walk the walk.’ I couldn’t tell them drinking was badd, and then get drunk. Just one beer in the old days was enough to get my son questioning me on alcohol and ‘how come you drink, Dad?’
It was just too much to balance. What’s become problematic, though, is that when I feel like a drink at the end of a long week, it’s late at night and alone. THAT’S not good.
Nov 10th, 2006 at 6:55 pm
[…] Adventure Dad: For me it’s all about life balance. Having kids doesn’t mean stop living. But I would never use alcohol in way that interferes with my parental duties. Having drinks around the kids, with or without friends, is not bad judgment as long as your doing it the right way. I talk to my kids about everything and that includes alcohol. […]