If You Drink Too Much On The Weekends, Your Parents Are Probably To Blame

I have an OK relationship with alcohol, and I do my best to honor my four-drinklimit.

Like most of my friends, I started drinking in high school. But unlike most ofmy friends, it was with my own dad, not in secret at parties.

Even though at 24 I now have excellent taste in wine, I didn’t know then thatmy dad’s influence would screw me up in a bunch of super fun ways. Regardlessof how people my age were introduced to drinking, apparently we were waymore into it than the teens of today.

And it wasn’t our fault, either. It’s our parents who are to blame. According toresearch from The Institute of Alcohol Studies, parents are less likely to drinkin front of their kids and are more open to discussing the repercussions ofdrinking underage.

But, I wasn’t a great kid anyway. Every other week, my ass was grounded forbreaking my dad’s ridiculously strict rules. He was in the army once, so he had amore militant approach to parenting. If you did something wrong, there wouldbe consequences. And those consequences left me phone-less for a year once.

Yep, my dad took my phone away for a year in high school, but maybe that timeI deserved it.

Either way, there was no negotiation. If I fucked up, I got grounded. End ofstory. Ironically, my strict dad would often forget what he grounded me for, andI would have to remind him.

Despite all that, my dad, not being from the US, never really cared about thelegal drinking age of this country. He isn’t a heavy drinker at all, but he lovesred wine.

It started small. He would give me a sip of beer here, a swig of wine there.Maybe a splash of Bailey’s liqueur in my coffee. (He’s obsessed with Bailey’s.) Inever felt anything from it, but I definitely liked to try it.

The first time I got drunk was during a particularly tense Thanksgiving dinner.All the adults left their half-drunk glasses of wine in the kitchen. So as themeal went on, I kept sneaking out to finish them.

Even at 16, I knew that wine shouldn’t go to waste. So yeah, I participated in myfair share of underage drinking.

Now that I’m a few year past the legal drinking age, I would say on average, Idrink four nights a week. Sometimes I’ll just have a beer with dinner at homeby myself, and sometimes I’ll throw ’em back at a bar with friends. I try my bestnot to surpass my four-drink limit, but once in awhile, I totally blow it.

As much as I’d hate to admit it, that sounds like a lot when I write it out. Do Idrink too much? Seeing that I have my life together, I don’t have a good reasonto make changes just yet. But compared to the kids of today, I’m much worseoff. And so is the rest of my generation.

Thanks, Dad.

And according to this new research, apparently alcohol would be too expensivefor me to even want to buy it if I was a teen today. Great, so I subjected my 16-year-old body to potential alcohol poisoning because people weren’t smartenough to raise the tax and price of alcohol yet? Cool.

When I was a senior in high school, if I wanted to get any alcohol, I had to askthat one dude in our school who looked twice his age and had a fake ID to buy itfor me. My school was small, and we only had one go-to guy for beer. Thinkingback, he probably made so much money ripping us off for cheap bottles.

Seriously, if I was a teenager now, it’s crazy to think that I would live in a timewhen parents are nicer and consider their drinking behavior more carefully.And I would have Snapchat.

So yeah, being 16 in 2016 must be the shit.