I noticed this right off. In college, kids who had been allowed an occasional alcholic drink at home by their parents never got into the binge drinking thing.
Kids who were forbidden, the biggest binge drinkers.
I remember a friend of mine visiting was shocked that my parents’ liquor was out in the open and not in locked away. She said “Do they leave it out like that when they’re gone and you’re home alone?” Of course, they did, and none of us kids ever drank anything. It wasn’t because we were goody twoshoes ... it just never occured to us. We didn’t have to be sneaky.
In contrast, 3 out of 5 of my friend and her siblings, who grew up in a strict teetotaler household, are now alcholics.
Forty years ago in South Jersey, there was tradition of paying an adult to go into a liquor store and buy a bottle of cheap red wine, aka "dago red". Upon getting the wine, the ringleader would tie a rope to it and immerse it in the lake at the county park to keep it chilled. Come the dark of a summer evening, the guys would go down to the "crick", as "creek" was pronounced in South Jersey, open up the bottle -- we didn't uncork it because it didn't have a cork -- and then the assembled multitude would get stinking drunk. And I mean "stinking". They would throw up for days afterward.
One night I received an invitation to join the festivities, and I demurred. I was immediately classified as a "pussy".
While my friends were getting eaten alive by Jersey mosquitoes (the state bird), I was home watching a late movie on TV ("Rio Bravo", I recall). I built myself a late night snack, taking some of my mother's leftover roast beef and making two sandwiches, backed up by pickles, olives and my mother's homemade roast peppers. I washed it all down with a couple of Schaefer's. ("Schaefer is the one beer to have when you're having more than one.") I did all this in the comfort of an air conditioned house.
The next day I ran into my friends. They were all throwing up intermittently and looked like they had been dined on by our local insects. But they were happy.
"What did I miss"?" I asked.
"We had a great time! I got so-o-o-o drunk!"
I just smiled at them.
That’s a bit of a truism (meaning it’s true when it’s true and not when it isn’t.) We were brought up allowed a little alcohol, and we both turned out to be alcoholics.
except this article seems to contradict that notion. i expected
to learn that people in wisconsin weren’t binge drinkers and
didn’t have high rates of dui.
“I noticed this right off. In college, kids who had been allowed an occasional alcholic drink at home by their parents never got into the binge drinking thing.”
Well, maybe I’m an odd one, but I grew up in a home where I was allowed to partake in wine with dinner - if I wanted it which I usually didn’t because I didn’t like the taste. But I still went through a period of “binge” drinking (5 drinks at a sitting? That’s just a warm-up to a real binge.), and still do occasionally “drink for effect”, as they say. But I don’t drink and drive, and I don’t hurt anyone or neglect anything because of it, so I don’t consider it a problem.