I'm angry and feeling the need to vent. I found out that a boy we know had his 18th birthday party last night. NO ADULTS in the vicinity because the parents had to go out of town and the son assured them he could be trusted....yeah right! They decided to trust said son with a few rules and not force them to have grandparents present. Needless to say, all rules were broken. There was alcohol, 25 kids and a slumber party (if you call young men and women sprawled in every room a slumber party...). I was a teen a helluva long time ago and I KNOW how even chicken-shit me would have handled that without an adult to supervise. What in the HELL were the parents thinking!? Do they not realize that 18 means ADULT in the real world?! Congratulations, you’re eighteen. You can now go to JAIL! Here’s another question…. since these parents had no choice to be out of town so they really had no control over what was going on in their absence….Where did the parents of the guest kids think they were all night? Staying at Suzy’s? Did they call Suzy’s house – not her cell, duh -- to check? Who provided the alcohol? And the kids that had a curfew, what condition were they in when they left? What pisses me off and scares the crap outta me all at once is that my family may have been out there on the road with drunk kids leaving that party. Friends and family could have been killed by yet another car load full of kids from hell. Mark had driven to pick up Gloria. Gloria’s friends that have licenses were driving themselves home with minimal driving experience which means without the ability to avoid an accident that might happen to them. Monica was probably coming back to her place after a late night out. They were out on the road when drunk teenagers may have been on the road. I am SO angry.
So here’s the deal….were YOUR kids at a toga dance at school on Friday night? Where did they go afterwards? Where did they spend the night? Where are they now….Saturday morning and in what condition? Did you check their breath? I was a teenager once. If my kids are out late, they MUST come and kiss me good night. Warm and cuddly, perhaps, but I’m also checking breath and they know it. If your friends have high school age kids, please forward this blog to them. Somebody has to start asking the hard questions of their kids. Sixteen doesn’t mean, “Here’s the keys. Thank goodness I don’t have to drive you anymore”. For me, it was “Here’s the keys. Now I will worry more than when you were five and walking home from the bus stop alone.”
2 comments:
Parents certainly have a responsibility, but so does everybody else in society, including the kids. The way I see it, the best you can do is put kids on the right path, and then if they mess up it's their own fault.
I can understand kids drinking and being wild - that's something that is bound to happen and so, like you were saying, parents need to keep track of their kids. Clearly the situation you bring up here is one where parents should have been supervising.
But when it comes to drunk driving, I blame parents less. Not drinking and driving is just common sense, or at least it should be. We should start seriously incarcerating these DUI offenders and maybe people of all ages would start getting the hint.
Anyway, good blog. Got me angry too.
if i knew what you were talking about, i would say that the 25 people stayed the night so they DIDN'T drive home drunk. they stayed to sleep it off.
there wasn't any drunk driving.
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