Late Night Fiction Being a weirdo so you don’t have to!

Kids Drinking

I was reading this story: Author: Letting kids drink early reduces binging - CNN.com

The basic problem is this: for the first 18 years or so of our life we're doing the heaviest of our learning. We learn about life through our first-hand experiences and through our parents. Drinking is one of those things that obviously (because of how much underage-drinking there is) we have no inhibitions or limitations by default. To control yourself with anything is to have something in the back of your head (sometimes in our world called a conscience or morals) that is preventing you to do it. I'll give you an example. Why do I not like blowing my whole paycheck as soon as I get it, and instead save most of it? I was taught as a kid to always conserve. I was taught as a teen that if I want to make it one day, I have to be smart with my money (more in-depth of course, but that was the gist of it). I was taught all of this at an age where I was very impressionable (first 18 years or so), to where it became a habit and a natural part of my thinking, which includes those inhibitions.

We live in a society today where there are so many forbidden things. Sex is forbidden. When I was 13, we were still calling "sex" doing "s-e-x" or "it". The female body is such a forbidden thing, I was damn excited (and had to show all my friends) when I got an encyclopedia that explained human reproduction (with pictures nonetheless). But it was such a forbidden thing that it becomes a goal to actually go out and have sex. To lose your "virginity." And this is the case for everything in our world that is forbidden. It's human nature to want to go against what your parents, especially when you don't get any story besides "Don't do that."

You can't learn more from anything that isn't experiencing it for yourself. When you experience something for yourself you get every part of it. From what you see, hear, taste, smell, and feel to what you think and how you react to the experience at that moment. I can't explain why parents believe it's better to censor their children from the world than to have them experience it for themselves. So I won't speculate on what that reason is. But I think the very root of many of these problems we have, underage drinking or "binge drinking" as they refer to it as, comes down to lack of knowledge. And what better way to educate your children about these apparent "dangers" than to let them get the entire story first-hand, in your own parentally-controlled environment?