The drinking age in Colorado when I was a teen was 18 for 3.2% beer and 21 for everything else. I don't know if the accident/death rate among 18-20 year olds went down of not, though I think I WOULD know if it had gone down significantly since it would have been highly touted. I generally agree that if someone is old enough to accept the consequences of so many things at 18, then they are almost certainly old enough to accept the responsibility to drink responsibly. The significant reduction in drunk driving fatalities on our roads is much more strongly correlated with much stricter penalties and enforcement that has taken place over the last few decades. I remember, as a child, that killing someone with your car was treated LESS seriously if you were drunk because, after all, you weren't in complete control of yourself and so how can you be held responsible.

As for this moronic dad, I really don't know which I find worse. That he let underage kids drink at the party (that's bad by itself), that he let them get completely drunk (if you are going to let them drink, then monitor things and keep them from getting wasted), or having them pretend to be Playboy bunnies and prance around half naked and who knows what else was going on there. That last part I find particularly loathsome.

You know what I like to call this historical age of the world? Not the space age, or information age or stuff like that... this age is the age of the Death of Common Sense... we've fallen victims to so many contradictions based in political correctness and pseudo-liberal thinking that we have forgotten where we came from... we've lost all reference to our origins and are now doing exactly what ISIS is doing with their cultural heritage... except that we're not doing it in the material sense of the word by destroying monuments, paintings, sculptures and works of art... no ... we're destroying the very foundations of our society.. that is, we're destroying our very own families... but I don't want to rant here about that sort of thing... for one thing this might not be the appropriate place, and for another it would only get me even more depressed already...

 

That last part I find particularly loathsome.

Ditto. It would be sad but hardly news if the party was only about under-age drinking.

 

Ditto. It would be sad but hardly news if the party was only about under-age drinking.

And to do that for his daughter ... he just has to be insane...
Some people's minds are so open that their brains fall off...

 

And to do that for his daughter ... he just has to be insane...
Some people's minds are so open that their brains fall off...

'Tis said that: "An open mind is as an open window, absent a good screen, lots of crazy bugs fly in..."

Best regards
HP

 

While I feel the article linked in the OP is illustrative of reprehensible parenting (hence you may count me as a 'not') --- I am adamant that, with reference to 18 year-olds, inasmuch as they are deemed sufficiently 'mature' for (full) criminal liability/responsibility and military servitude, they're damn sure old enough to drink!...

Best regards
HP

I tend to agree, though my take on this story is that while it was the daughter's 18th birthday, many of her friends in attendance were under the age of 18.

I'm willing to admit that the age at which a person becomes sufficiently mature to handle X is not necessarily the same age at which they are sufficiently mature to handle Y. But then again the age at which person A is mature enough to handle X and not the same as the age at which person B is mature enough to handle X. So we are talking about distributions and percentiles to begin with. I'll also agree that it is very possibly not a good idea to go from treating someone as a child in all things one day to treating them as an adult in all things the next day, so the approach of graduated levels of freedom, authority, and accountability has quite a bit of merit. And I'll further agree that devising such a system that is properly balanced is not a trivial undertaking and is probably not even possible. If for no other reason than that any such system on a societal level is going to rely on what the parents (and others) are doing with children before and as they approach those milestones.

 

I tend to agree, though my take on this story is that while it was the daughter's 18th birthday, many of her friends in attendance were under the age of 18.

I'm willing to admit that the age at which a person becomes sufficiently mature to handle X is not necessarily the same age at which they are sufficiently mature to handle Y. But then again the age at which person A is mature enough to handle X and not the same as the age at which person B is mature enough to handle X. So we are talking about distributions and percentiles to begin with. I'll also agree that it is very possibly not a good idea to go from treating someone as a child in all things one day to treating them as an adult in all things the next day, so the approach of graduated levels of freedom, authority, and accountability has quite a bit of merit. And I'll further agree that devising such a system that is properly balanced is not a trivial undertaking and is probably not even possible. If for no other reason than that any such system on a societal level is going to rely on what the parents (and others) are doing with children before and as they approach those milestones.

Plus... as my momma used to say... a parent never ceases to be a parent, no matter how old the child is...
If a father or a mother becomes best friends with his or her child, the child will become an orphan

 

Ugh, no one likes drunken party for a birthday party. I admit not even drinking a can or two of a beer for so many months. My family never encouraged us to drink any alcohol, not even to the adulthood.

 

And with kids having role models like this one, what can you possibly expect?

 

Ugh, no one likes drunken party for a birthday party. I admit not even drinking a can or two of a beer for so many months. My family never encouraged us to drink any alcohol, not even to the adulthood.

Tell that to my Wife; she was pretty tipsy on her over the hill 50 party.

I don't think she remembers the hang over.

kv

Edit: I had one beer all night. I was the DmD. (Driving miss Daisy) home that evening.