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Teen drinking is universal outside the US, near-universal in the US, and lindy. "Moderate drinking at 17 damages developing brains" is only relevant if you think everyone was brain-damaged in a relevant way back in the day. Unless you are trying to raise your kids teetotal for religious reasons, you are raising them in a culture where drinking is ubiquitous, and the distinction between "drinking sensibly" and "drinking too much" is far more important to teach than the one between drinking below and above an arbitrary cutoff age. The punishable misbehaviour in that anecdote was travelling to a secondary location without informing the parents, which is a basic safety issue, particularly for girls.
This is the classic religious indoctrination problem, and it would be helpful if the Reddit mums grokked this. If you want your children not to adopt the lowest-common-denominator version of the locally prevailing culture, you either need to present them with a better (by their light, not yours) alternative, or control their information diet by heavy censorship. (This can be done - fundies in the US seem to do it successfully until the kid is 18 and goes off to university or gets a job at a non-fundie-owned business). And unfortunately it is hard to present civilised behaviour as a better alternative to what Tate is selling until he is finally convicted and jailed.
My sons are too young for this to be an issue yet, but I am reasonably clear that the product I am selling is a working marriage (and children), that In This House We Belive that Andrew Tate is a gypsy's prison bitch, and that part of men raising men is letting them know the well-known true facts about women that the RedPill crowd present as a new and subversive discovery. The reason why people like Tate have an audience is that both mainstream red-tribe Christianity and mainstream blue-tribe feminism are lying about what women want. The rest of the culture need to find a non-toxic way of sharing the truth if they don't want to be outcompeted. I used Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynmann when I was a kid.
Factually, they were. From the 20th century via leaded gasoline & lead paint, & as far back as Babylon with lead glassware, flatware, pipes, etc.
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I agree with these bits, that essentially you need to offer a more persuasive product. I think for parents that are intelligent and informed it is not so difficult to do this. For example my father always gave me a sort of "redpilled" view on HBD, and being a geneticist it wasn't hard for him to make a more convincing case than netflix and my grade school teachers. For parents that are stupid and don't lead exemplary lives (as arguments can be made by words or by examples) I think unfortunately for them their children are at the mercy of the broader culture.
Perhaps that, then, is the fundamental horror of raising teenagers for most parents- especially the ones who are just intelligent enough to know this happens, but are unable to stop it. It's especially important for parents who want to retain beliefs that are more incompatible with local reality [as contrasted with simply 'untrue', which is how the wise-to-wicked pipeline works] to be much more intelligent/capable than the general population such that their child retains them.
Hence the attempts to ride the ever-decreasing amount of power they have into the ground.
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My parents were normal, middle class people. I remember being warned that certain discussions about race did not leave the family- although they didn’t use the word ‘HBD’.
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It's interesting that everyone here is ignoring the sex of the child in question.
Teenage drinking is lindy for teenage boys ... but not for unmarried, unchaperoned girls.
What the heck is "lindy", anyways? I've only ever seen that in the context of swing dancing and I'm pretty sure that's not what @MadMonzer meant.
It refers to the Lindy Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
The basic idea is that something that has been going for a long time is probably going to go on for a long time.
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When I was a teenager, I was allowed to drink at parties as long as I didn’t drive back. For my sister(one grade below me), I had to be there and in a state cognizant of what was going on. Even at the time, we both understood the reason well enough to never break the rule.
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How would you share the truth about What Women Want?
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I haven't seen "grok" in at least forty years!
I remember seeing it in an issue of Wired from like 20 years ago.
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You might start hearing about it a lot.
It's the name of X AI's product. Apparently, they made some pretty big advances in networking large numbers of GPU's together and have now built the world's largest computer which they are using to train Grok3.
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I feel I see it fairly regularly.
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Should be less than forty. I’m not that old.
I'm not that old either, it was definitely a popular term on the net in the nineties.
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...which is, IMHO, not that far-fetched of a hypothesis.
Looking at people nowadays they seem neither happier nor smarter. Is the take here supposed to be "brain damage good, actually"?
I read speculation along those lines once somewhere in the SSCverse, that when you look at the behavioral symptoms of CTE in football players, veterans, and boxers they look more or less like severer and maladaptive versions of the traits that we view modern men as lacking. Aggression, risk taking, etc.
And the theory was, the human brain is actually adapted to getting a few concussions. If you look at history, most men would get a few growing up. The human brain essentially comes from the factory with too much risk aversion and doesn't reach optimal broken in condition until getting whacked a few times.
I find it wild speculation, but then I look at my own life and I suffered a severe concussion, and more or less contemporaneously I snapped out of my doldrums and started acting with a bit of ambition.
Sometimes it hard to know where your limits are until you get your bell rung a couple times.
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My instinct is that the substitute activities people are engaging with are actually even worse than what happened to teenagers before for your brains.
I’m actually fine with teenagers drinking beer and wine in moderation, I learned to do so because I reached legal drinking age outside of the USA and I had a parent who was very modest in their alcohol consumption. Basically all of my bad alcohol habits I picked up when I came back and lived in the burbs and attached myself to the local party scene.
It may have some negative consequences, but as stated above it’s one of lindy-est things to ever lindy.
Internet brain rot, social media obsession, binge video gaming, and a sedentary indoor life style seems much much worse to me in terms of damage to young people’s brain. Massive spikes in youth depression, anxiety and isolation seem to bear this out.
Pick your poison, I imagine every generation since the first has had to deal with this issue.
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This. In my town, it was normal to start drinking beer around 12-14, and to start drinking hard alcohol (up to blackout drunk) around 14-16. And I'm not talking about poor white trash, this is a prosperous, unusually high TFR conservative & religious farmer's region in western germany.
where do kids there go to drink? Do they just openly drink with their parents?
I think the most sketchy thing about it for teenagers in America is there just really isn't a good place to drink. Bars won't serve you of course, or even allow kids to enter. They don't own their own house so they can't host a party. You could maybe drink get away quickly in the car or outside, but that's highly illegal and risky. Going to the house of some strange adult who's willing to host an underage drinking party is... suspicious at best, and can lead to really bad things happening.
this might have been different in the past, when it was more common for parents to work late or go out alone and leave the kids home alone.
A quick google says that the drinking age in Germany is 14 if a responsible adult is buying the drinks, and 16 if the kids are buying beer or wine for themselves (18 for spirits). I'm not sure about Germany, but teens openly drinking with parents including in bars and restaurants is normal in France and Italy, even when it is technically illegal (which it now mostly is - France raised their drinking age to 18 in 2009 and Italy in 2011). I used to travel round France a lot with my parents, and I was noticeably younger than 14 (at that time the legal drinking age for wine with a meal) when waiters at respectable French restaurants started offering me a glass of my parents' bottle of wine.
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It's complicated and not just about alcohol, but generally yes, or with their tacit acceptance. I'll use the example of a specific festivity, "Maibaum pflanzen" ("planting the May-Tree"), because it's a nice progression from young to old, but just our small town would have a low double-digit number of festivities like these (for the interested germans, the others I remember in my town were: Straßenfest, Dorffest, Gemeindefest, Wursteball, Osterfeuer, Schützenfest, Karneval, Vaterstag). Once you're 16, you'd also be allowed to drive over to other towns, which meant that there was something going on every weekend.
End of April, we would celebrate the start of spring by going into the nearby forest, cutting down a birch, and setting it up in our local neighbourhood. All neighbourhoods around would do this, with around 20 people per tree, so you would have something like 10 trees up in walking distance, and of those everyone would know literally everyone else. You'd sit down in a circle around a fire and the tree would be some meters away so that it's hard to see from the fire in the dark. There would be a game of stealing the trees from others, mostly played by teens and young adults, and next day the captured trees would be chopped into small pieces and distributed among the group, some keeping their piece as a celebration to commemorate the number of trees stolen, but usually just for burning wood.
Before you're 12, you'd generally just help decorate the tree, eat Bratwurst, play games with the other kids, maybe visiting some other trees with a group of kids. Some neighbourhoods would put up a "kid's tree" which was just a branch from the larger tree, and which would be small enough for the younger kids to steal without needing an axe. Once you're around 12, you'd be allowed to help cut and carry the tree in earnest and drink your first beer (obviously, cutting the tree was itself a beer drinking game) and help protecting the adult tree. Around 14, you'd be allowed to join the older teens when stealing adult trees (which is mostly done between 2-6 in the morning when the majority of the adults went to bed, and the few left over to protect the tree will be drunk or even sometimes fell asleep), and the older teens would let you drink your first hard alcohol with them. This would often also be the first time when you get REALLY drunk once, and you (as well as the older teens that supplied you) would be lightly punished or at least reprimanded by your parents to be more careful next time.
Around 16, you'd be strong enough to carry a tree with a group of other teens, which meant that you'd be allowed your own tree altogether. Whether you actually did this depends on whether you can organize a group of older teens/young adults large enough, a place where you'd be allowed to put up the tree, and food & drinks for everyone, including visitors. This would be the time when getting REALLY DRUNK will be fully tolerated. When I was around 17, we'd set up a tree with 6 teens my age at my parent's house (since they were away for the night at the neighbourhood's tree) and vowed we'd protect our tree by putting a nail in the tree for every finished bottle of hard alcohol and hang the bottle there, and when we woke up the entire tree was decorated fully with more than 20 bottles. We've had a few visitors, but even accounting for that it means everyone drank at least 2-3 full bottles of hard alcohol (and we also drank at other trees we visited), in addition to copious amounts of beer which is generally not even counted (we literally have the saying "you can't get drunk on beer") and which we obviously didn't even bother putting on the tree. We all had such a bad hangover that we didn't go out drinking the next day, which you'd usually do as it is worker's day with lots of bigger festivals. My parents just laughed and made fun of us.
So you usually don't drink much hard alcohol directly with your parents as a teen, it's expected of you to help organize events with friends which then allow you to get drunk. Most parents directly help supply some amount of alcohol for every celebration you throw or join, but usually you have to organize some on top of that (which isn't difficult). Drinking alone or at any time that isn't a designated known event is heavily frowned upon(except beer, since, again, it doesn't count). Some teens would only join events with their parents, and correspondingly drink much less, much later.
Interesting! Thanks for the detailed discription. It sounds fun, and also uniquely German in an interesting way.
So you were mostly drinking outside in the forest? Who bought the drinks, the older teens or the parents?
As an American, the laws for liquor were very strict, so it was hard to get any. We would occasionally have "field parties" where you drive out to some random rural location, sit around a circle, maybe a fire if someone was prepared enough to bring supplies, and pass a bottle around (usually bought by someone with a "fun" older sibling). Really a miserable experience all around I think. The more common way was that we'd go to the house of our friend who had an alcoholic single mom, wait for her to fall asleep, and then raid her liquor cabinet. Yeah... not good times. We'd also have to think of a cover story to tell our parents.
Uh, no. For may-tree planting it varied wildly since you needed lots of space, but never in the forest since you want to make a camp fire, and a camp fire in the forest while drunk is how you get forest fires. Typically it would be something like a paddock, or a large roundabout, or in someone backyard if it's large enough. For other events it would usually be some large communal building, such as the old school building.
The parents usually supply whatever is on the high end of acceptance for your age, older teens whatever is on the low end. So for, say, a 14yo, parents would supply beer and older teens would supply harder alcohol (and it would be expected of the older teens to look after him, and this can be enforced since the parents know exactly who the older teens are). But it also varied a lot depending on the parents opinion.
Yeah sounds sad. I used to believe in the idea that some things can't be enforced, such as limiting alcohol, since it fit very with my experience and we were taught in school how badly prohibition fucked up. But nowadays I think it all is just secretly revealing your preferences, or at least of society at large - limiting alcohol can't be enforced if people don't want to. But if they do, it works.
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i went to highschool in the USA in the 90s: there were mutiple parties every weekend at various houses of kids whos parents were out of town, when the weather was good we'd sometimes have huge keg parties just out of town in a sort of nature area. something like the moon tower party in dazed and confused. not infrequently, people would get a hotel room to hang out in. pretty typical to go to multiple stops on a friday or saturday night.
even i, described once by a friend of my girlfriend as being a "cool nerd", knew multiple people who could get me weed, beer or liquor. friends of a friend would rarely show up with cocaine or acid, and i knew of older people using heroin but never saw any.
this type of partying was by far the main highschool social scene, i would guess 40% of kids were part of this including most of the athletes and popular types.
looking back, it seems like a major factor was parents constantly going out of town and leaving the kids in charge of nice single family homes, kind of surprising how much that was happening
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Same experience i had at an expensive private school in a western german city
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Sounds lovely. Is it still like this? I was a surprised at the number of closed Gaststätte / Wirtshaus in towns in rural Germany on a recent trip. Reminded of all the towns that lost their pubs in Ireland and the UK. ☹️
For better or worse, we've went through that process before my time; In our Bauernschaft of 500 people, there used to be 5 Kneipen, of which only a single one was still open when I was a kid (an I never went there myself, it was oly old people). I have been told that during covid, one secretly opened again though that has stopped once the measurements had been lifted.
During my teen years, it was typical to first meet at someone's place with a group to get drunk except for the designated drivers, and then you drive to wherever is the nearest current fair (usually a Schützenfest) at that weekend, which could be 20 kilometers or more. My friend group was with more than 20 people of both genders pretty large, so we would often just get drunk together and skip the part of driving anywhere.
From what I've heard, the region hasn't changed much culture and living standard-wise; It's not comparable to the pitiful misery that is the contemporary british countryside. In terms of TFR it's still among the highest in germany, but unfortunately it went through the same 2022 post-covid crash as the rest (up to that point, it had actually slowly been increasing for nearly a decade).
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