>They also described how often they felt lonely and how often they drank alcohol to the point of intoxication during the past month.
These two phrases put together shocked me.
10-13 yo drinking alcohol to the point of getting drunk?
Who sold alcohol to them? Where are their parents?!
Gather 580 middle school students and you’ll find a subset of them engaging in shocking behavior. This can usually be traced back to a combination of disengaged parents and older siblings who are a bad influence. 13 year olds are teenagers and are plenty capable of stealing their parents’ alcohol if desired.
The prevalence of these behaviors varies wildly from one demographic to another. I’ve been involved with schools with highly involved parents where a student even hearing rumors of one of their peers consuming alcohol would set in motion a chain of events where parents talked to each other and their kids about alcohol use and took steps to keep each other informed and lock their own alcohol away.
Meanwhile I have extended family who teach in two different farming communities. It’s not uncommon for even middle schoolers to get caught with drugs or arrive at school under the influence of something. Not all of them, of course, but it’s a frequent enough occurrence that it’s not all that noteworthy when it happens again.
The range of parenting styles and home environments across the United States is extreme. It can be unfamiliar to many who grew up in one bubble to hear about the vast differences that exist in other bubbles.
That is only part of the solution. Kids do more modeling than critical thinking. Parents and other role models need to show kids a good example. Bad behavior in kids is largely from bad modeling by the people they look up to, not insufficient instruction. Certainly the "why" should be explained, but saying "don't lie" means nothing if the person saying it then goes around lying constantly.
There is also the question of children becoming more peer oriented than parent oriented, which has become an increasingly prevelant situation the past century or so. The kids with better behavior tend to seek instruction, modeling, and self-worth from their parents. Kids with worse behavior tend to seek instruction, modeling, and self-worth from their peers (which is generally a terrible idea).
The age at which my school peers were introduced to alcohol was in high school, 16-18 range, when everybody started going out at night.
I do not remember anybody even joking about drinking alcohol before then.
Starting high school (~age 15, legal drinking age is 16) we’d go to bars to have a beer.
They did want to see government IDs in shops, but I guess that highly depends on the shop or your exact location.
Definitely not legal. How come the owners aren't in jail? This is no joke, we are talking about children.
Seems like serious levels of corruption.
Here in the Netherlands, about 10 years ago, there was a new law that coffeeshops selling marihuana are not allowed within 250 meter from schools. That is a rule working the other way around.
But the older people start, the better. Ideally, as an adult, as kids are not responsible for themselves.
But it’s not like most kids that age sit around drinking all day. You would occasionally happen into it and have a party with friends.
My parents were present, but I just didn’t do it in front of them. That’s not that hard to figure out. I would “go to a friends house,” they would “go to my house,” and in reality we went to the lake and drank and smoked up.
I don’t think this is a new phenomenon. We were doing it 35 years ago, and the oldsters I knew had done it too.
Wow. In contrast, it never crossed my mind to buy alcohol (or pot) at 13.
It was not a thing in my environment, either. The mere idea of kids getting drunk is insanity from my perspective.
During my time at middle school, I knew 5 outcast kids who were regularly getting drunk and high at 12 years old.
All had troubled families and/or divorced parents.