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Once September rolls around there are a lot more “reasons” for parents to indulge in an alcoholic beverage. Parent drinking culture can seem like it isn’t problematic, but the drinks can add up without many people realizing it.
What You’ll Learn:
• Why the school-year drinking calendar works differently.
• What parent drinking culture actually is, and why it's so hard to see from inside it.
• What your kids are learning from the pattern.
• How to get through the school year without the calendar deciding your drinking for you.
Parenting isn’t easy, especially at the start of a new school year. There's the first sideline Saturday, and somebody's dad has a cooler. There's the booster club meeting that moved to the local brewery because attendance was better there.
There's the group chat that has already used the wine glass emoji four times before the end of September.
Many moms and dads use alcohol as a stress reliever and way to socialize with other parents. The occasional drink can serve that purpose without creating problems.
But when every school-related event involves a few drinks, that’s when the school-year drinking calendar fills up fast in a troubling way.
Just like football season drinking you don’t have to let the fall become all about alcohol. The first thing is understanding the slippery slope of school year drinking that trips up lots of parents.
The School Year Isn't a Season. It's a Schedule.
The start of the school year is a 9-10 month ongoing schedule, not a short season. If you add it all up, there are easily 30-40 occasions that could lead to school year drinking, and that doesn’t even count birthday parties.
Even if you tell yourself that you’re simply easing into the school year, drinking can quickly become a regular (1+ times a week) thing for most of the year. That’s why you can’t think of it as just a month or a season.
In reality, it can quickly become a way of life,
What Makes the Parent Drinking Culture Unique in a Bad Way
In the United States, we’re a drinking culture. Within it are a lot of sub-cultures that can become communities. The parenting drinking culture is unique for a few key reasons:
It's the only drinking culture that's openly marketed as a coping mechanism. Nobody sells a football fan a shirt that says he needs beer to survive Sunday.
But "mommy juice," "wine o'clock," and "it's not drinking alone if the kids are home" are on mugs, tote bags, greeting cards and the back window of the minivan in front of you.
The joke is always the same joke: parenting is hard, and alcohol is a self-medication coping mechanism.
The reason that the joke works is that the first half is true. The caregiving load is real. The mental load of managing a household's schedule is real.
The isolation of being with small children all day, or of moving to a town where your only social contacts are other parents at pickup, is real. Parent drinking culture didn't invent those stresses. It just attached a product to them.
It's socially rewarded rather than hidden. Problematic drinking often involves some concealment. This kind doesn't. Ordering the drink is a sociable move.
Declining it is the one that requires an explanation, and often reads to the group as a quiet judgment of everyone who didn't decline. That's a strong incentive, and it operates on people who aren't otherwise heavy drinkers at all.
It's aimed most directly at women, but it isn't only about moms. The merchandise and the marketing are pointed squarely at moms most of the time.
The sideline cooler, the coach's postgame beer and the "dad needs one after that game" script are pointed at fathers, but get discussed less.
Your Kids Are Learning the Pattern
The thing to consider is that your kids are watching all of this unfold. Parents tend to worry about being drunk in front of their children, but that's the wrong thing to focus on. Simply drinking in front of them has an impact.
Researchers use the term alcohol expectancies for the beliefs kids form about what alcohol does and what it's for, long before they ever try it.
Those expectancies are shaped early by watching parents, and positive expectancies formed in childhood predict heavier and more frequent drinking later. The drinking pattern does the teaching.
The heavier end of it shows up in the data more sharply. Parental heavy episodic drinking is associated with earlier alcohol initiation and heavier drinking in adolescence.
Studies have found that having two heavy episodic drinking parents particularly predicts early and heavier adolescent drinking.
In one study, roughly one in five adolescents had seen at least one parent drunk, and that was associated with an increased likelihood of the adolescent binge drinking.
How to Get Through the School Year Without Excessive Alcohol Going Through You
School-year events are one of the core parts of being a parent, but attending them doesn’t have to mean drinking through the experience.
Map it in September. Get a more accurate idea of how much activity there will be in September. It sets the tone for the rest of the fall and winter seasons. Make note of events that will likely have alcohol involved.
Sort the social from the automatic. Some events are centered around alcohol more than others.Then there are events where it’s easier to pass because alcohol isn’t in abundance and most people aren’t drinking.
Reserve indulging in a few alcoholic beverages when it’s a regular part of the festivities.
Watch the post pickup trigger. For a lot of parents the real volume comes from the ordinary weekday drink that arrives at a fixed time, after pickup, once homework is started, the moment the last kid is upstairs.
Drinking 1-2 drinks five nights a week puts people in the moderate use category.
Want a little extra support this school year? It’s easier to keep drinking to a minimum with naltrexone daily medication.
It helps blunt the dopamine effect of alcohol so you have less of an urge to drink while still having a few beverages during a social event.
Take the Alcohol Use Assessment to learn more about getting an online prescription for naltrexone.
