I TOOK A 'BITE' AT A YOUNG AGE, BUT WOULD I HAVE MADE DIFFERENT CHOICES IF MY PARENTS HAD OFFERED ME A SMALL TASTE?
By Ester Salguero
My sister Reina was the ‘devil on my shoulder’ while I was growing up. She made life so much more fun. I grew up in a strict household, governed by my parents’ Pentecostal values, which meant that we weren’t allowed to talk about sex, drugs or alcohol. In their minds, talking about these things would lead me into an abyss of sinful desire and if I gave into them, then the next place would be hell, to put it bluntly. As rigid as my parents were, there were surprisingly few rules when I was with my sister because they trusted her to take care of me. There wasn’t even a curfew and we both took advantage of that to partake in the “forbidden fruit;” alcohol.
Ester Salguero
One afternoon when I was 12, my sister picked me up from home after school to go to her friend Steven’s house. My sister was 17 and her friend was 18. That night they were planning to drink. They had stolen some of the cheapest alcoholic drinks they could find at our local gas station called Four Lokos, it was the poor man’s booze. I was sitting in a room with the two of them when Steven offered me some of his drink. Reina looked at him in shock for a second. She went on talking about how she wasn’t going to corrupt her sister at such a young age, mind you she was already kind of tipsy by that point. Then, she went ahead and asked me what I wanted to do because she didn’t want to make choices for me.
I ended up almost drinking the entire 23-ounce can. I remember going outside, spontaneously, as drunk people usually do and I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood with my sister’s friend. That night ended with me puking into a bush of roses. Hopefully, no one would smell them the next morning. It wasn’t my finest moment but it started a pattern. Though I wouldn’t say I have a drinking problem, I certainly wasn’t responsible around alcohol. Whenever I drank, I did it to get drunk.
When I got to college, and I started to observe other people’s drinking habits, I noticed how some friends seemed to know intuitively when to stop drinking for the evening. One friend in particular, who almost never drank too much, explained that her parents would offer her drinks whenever she felt stressed or had a headache. I started to wonder if maybe her parents raised her right while mine did it all wrong. Maybe, if they had exposed me to alcohol, it wouldn’t have been so alluring growing up. Maybe I’d even have more responsible drinking habits as a young adult.
Taken by some dude, Freshman year fall semester 2014, before leaving to a Rave sponsored by BASSMENT.
I started with my roommate Sarah. I remembered her telling me once during her freshman year that she had made the choice to purposely stay away from alcohol so she wouldn’t get distracted from her work. That lasted until around February during the spring semester when we got our hands on some rum.
I asked her what made her get to that point, since for me, I saw college as a time to finally let loose, the be free, away from the rules of my parents. I asked her, “So what kind of rules did your parents have over alcohol consumption for you growing up?”
She explained that her parents kept beer in the house all the time. Beer was used like ibuprofen in Sarah’s house, it was used to treat headaches. They didn’t keep liquor, though. Her parents never got trashed around her. They drank in moderation but regularly.
“I grew up seeing it as something that was not necessarily a bad thing and I always got to see people drink in healthy ways, socially [and] in small amounts never getting drunk,” Sarah said.
Flickr Creative Commons
Sarah said that didn’t make her moderate her intake, necessarily. In fact, she drank in excess the summer before freshmen year in college. Most of the time her and her friends would stay over one friend’s house to party. That friend’s parents would allow her to hold parties all the time as long as everyone stayed the night and gave their keys up for safe keeping. After that it was out of her system for a while. She wanted to take college seriously because she wasn’t so sure of herself but she knew she wanted to succeed.
The friends that surrounded me during freshman year toned my wild side down a lot, which helped me stabilize myself while trying to adjust to the first years of college life. There still wasn’t a clear reasoning to me about why I felt the need to drink so badly and why my friends seemed less interested.
I decided to ask another friend of mine about what her parents’ rules were on alcohol consumption because I noticed that she has been going to parties on the weekends about as much as I have been this semester. In the pouring rain on our way back to our residence building, Eagle Landing, I asked Izzy how her parents dealt with drinking.
“In my house I was allowed to take either a sip or taste of alcohol, really, as young as I can remember,” Izzy told me this on our way to Eagle Landing and she also talked about how her parents did this because they would rather have her drinking under their supervision than with a bunch of strangers at a party.
The times that I have seen Izzy at parties she has been more coherent than myself and I think that was a result of the model that her parents portrayed with alcohol consumption. I think for a large majority of college students the weekends are treasured because they are our form of releasing the tensions from the week before, usually with alcohol as the substance to get us there. However, some people take it further than others and I found myself wondering why?
I asked Debra Steckler, a specialist on emerging adulthood at the University of Mary Washington, what would happen if parents were to drink with their kids in a responsible setting. She said, “if the parent drinks with the kids in a responsible way that behavior will have beneficial effects on the child’s drinking behavior, the children will grow up seeing responsible drinking modeled for them and will follow their parent’s example.”
Steckler told me how young-adults learn from example by modeling the habits that they have observed, whether it be in their household, on television or at school. “Kids have to get their information from somewhere, and if they are not getting accurate information from their parents they will get inaccurate information from their peers,” she says. “Experience is also a form of information, so if adolescents aren’t getting accurate information about alcohol, sex, drugs, etc. from their family they will find out on their own, many times with negative consequences.”
Sarah Roche
A study completed by the Departments of Preventive Medicine and Psychology at the University of Southern California titled “Forbidden Fruit and the Prediction of Cigarette Smoking,” shows how youth have a rebellious response to products that have been restricted or limited in their use. Youth ignore the limitations as a way to indicate their own independence.
My sister was experiencing the need to prove her independence. She had her own car and for a period of time she lived with her friends. Of course, that wasn’t okay with my parents but she did it anyways, along with lots of drinking since her friends’ single father didn’t see any harm in that. My sister wanted to show my parents that she could make her own choices. In some ways, I felt the same way as her.
I don’t blame my parents for the way they raised me. They did the best they could. I mean they aren’t experts in psychology and while they didn’t show me how to drink moderately, they did model many other things for me. Like how to socialize with friends without drinking alcohol, how to be myself and to be cautious around strangers. I don’t know if I’ll ever tell them about the early memories I have of drinking with my sister. In my parents’ eyes I am an angel because I never had to confess to them about my drunken nights, though my dad has had his suspicions.
Ester Salguero
Something about learning how to drink moderately on your own makes all the difference. Watching my sister make her own mistakes with her friends and listening to horror stories she would tell me the day after her binge drinking provided me the lessons I needed to stop drinking excessively. In the absence of an example from my parents, I learned from my sister and her mistakes. She would see videos that she had taken of herself drunk and pictures that her friends had taken of her that would make her cringe but there were more serious determents as well. I didn’t want any of that, my academics were first and foremost.
I haven’t cut out drinking completely but I’ve made it a smaller part of my life. Until I turn 21 I think drinking will remain something exciting to do on the weekends.