Recently, there has been a spate of novels, short stories, memoirs and non-fiction books published that touch on the topic of women and alcohol–Here is just a sampling:

MOMMY DOESN’T DRINK HERE ANYMORE by Rachel Brownell (memoir)

IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor (personal essays written before the popular blogger/memoirist announced she was quitting drinking)

BLAME by Michelle Huneven (novel)

LIT by Mary Karr (memoir, see excerpt in Drinking Diaries)

“Intervention” a short story in Jill McCorkle’s collection GOING AWAY SHOES

TROUBLE by Kate Christensen (novel w/ lots of unapologetic drinking)

ONCE WAS LOST by Sara Zarr (young adult novel with alcoholic mother)

And for those of you interested in poetry, there’s FLAWED LIGHT: American Women Poets and Alcohol, a non-fiction book about women poets and alcohol.

Some of my personal, perennial favorites:

SMASHED by Koren Zailckas (memoir)

ROSIE by Anne Lamott (novel, featuring a woman struggling with her relationship to alcohol)

AT HOME IN THE WORLD by Joyce Maynard (memoir, & she’s the daughter of an alcoholic)

What are your favorite books that touch on the subject of women and alcohol? Favorite movies? Poems? Please share!

To let your teens sip, or not to let them sip champagne on New Year’s Eve? That is the question. 

Perhaps you’ll be sitting at home with your family, having a glass of champagne and watching the ball drop. Or maybe you’ll be having a party, or out at a party, or on vacation, where there’s drinking aplenty.

Maybe you’re not a parent, but you probably have an opinion, nonetheless. So do you approve or disapprove of teens sipping champagne along with their parents on New Year’s?

There are two camps: the loosen-up it’s New Year’s camp, and the it’s illegal and unhealthy to drink underage–even a sip–camp. Which camp are you in?

Here at drinking diaries, we have previously come down on the side of let your teen have a sip; what harm can it do? If alcohol is made to be forbidden or taboo, then it becomes desirable to a teen. Letting them have sips of champagne teaches moderation, and let’s face it, most kids have tried alcohol before 18. But there’s another side that’s equally compelling, as we read in a recent article on the Canadian newswire.

John Lieberman, director of operations for Visions Adolescent Treatment Centers in Malibu and Brentwood, California, is opposed to introducing kids to alcohol at home. According to Lieberman, “The studies show that the earlier someone has their first experience with drugs or alcohol or R-rated movies or sex, the earlier somebody does that, the more apt they are to have an addiction or a problem or consequences as a result of that behavior.”

Even in France, where the attitude toward drinking is perceived as laissez-faire, they’ve raised the drinking age from 16 to 18, due to increases in binge drinking and alcohol-induced hospitalizations.

Consider the words of Jeffrey Wolfsberg, head of a company that offers seminars to students and parents on drug and alcohol use and prevention: “When we look at who struggles with alcohol-related problems in college, it’s not the kids who go off with no drinking experience. It’s the kids who have established drinking patterns in high school.”

Interesting, but that wasn’t the case with me. I had no drinking experience whatsoever when I went off to college, and I went nuts. I had no idea how to drink; no idea of my limits. I was like a kid in a candy store.

So perhaps there’s no easy answer. When asked the question, “should parents let their teens have sips of champagne on New Years?” even Wolfsberg says maybe…maybe not:  ”Both approaches are fine..it’s not so much what’s being done–it’s the meaning [behind it] that matters most.”

So what will your approach be this New Year’s Eve? What is your opinion?

Last Spring, as I attended my fifth grader’s graduation from D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), I found myself acting like a kid myself–making snide remarks to my husband and getting all squirmy in my seat while I sneered at the suck-ups who read their winning essays.

“They’re like little robots,” I said. “We will ne-ver drink or do drugs.”

“Yeah, sure,” I found myself mumbling even though, throughout high school, I could have been a poster child for D.A.R.E., which is now taught in 80% of school districts.

So why the hostility and regression, on my part? Maybe it was the echoes of Nancy Reagan’s prissy, preachy “Just Say No” campaign, which seemed only to spur teenagers on to want to do more drugs, just to piss Nancy off.

But there had to be something else.

The uneasiness began when a female police officer came to a PTA meeting to discuss the program with us. After she spoke, the mothers in the audience had many questions. “I have a glass of wine or two on Friday nights in front of my children. Is that okay?”

And then someone asked the police officer, “Do you or did you drink?” “If so, do you tell your children?” The officer laughed and said something to the effect of, “I was kind of wild, but they don’t have to know that.” While I don’t feel the need to tell my kids the details of every college bender I ever went on, I don’t think I need to hide my moderate drinking from my children. That seems ludicrous. As the daughter of an alcoholic, I have a real problem with hiding things from my children (the elephant in the living room). Also, by making alcohol forbidden or taboo, it will only increase the thrill of sneaking.

After my daughter started her D.A.R.E. education, my daughter looked at a glass of wine in my hands like it was a gun.

Therein lies the problem with D.A.R.E.–they fail to make a distinction between that which is legal, accepted behavior (moderate alcohol consumption when you’re of drinking age) and that which is illegal (Drugs). In D.A.R.E. world, everything is bad. Period. While I’m grateful to the schools for trying to make kids more street smart and savvy, and I am all for it, I am not for moralizing. The facts, pure and simple, should speak for themselves. You can drink when you’re of legal drinking age. Period. Some people have a disease called alcoholism, and these people cannot drink. Some people drink too much and can get very sick, or even die. If you have a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, you should be careful. These kinds of facts are helpful, not: “Never drink.” Because the fact is (and the statistics bear me out), most teens will at least try drinking. The best part of the program is where they arm kids with ways to deal with peer pressure, and alternatives to drinking.

Equating drinking with drug use is, in my opinion, setting kids up for subterfuge and shame. Studies have shown that DARE actually increases girls’ drug use and drinking.

So what, then, is effective, if not DARE and its scare tactics? Addiction expert Stanton Peele has an interesting take on these programs:

“The prevailing prevention approach is to tell everyone not to do these things, claim no one successful has ever done them, and carry on with what everyone knows to be a complete fiction. (Think of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.)

Well, this is not the whole story. Neural research indicates that adolescent brains program kids to try risky behaviors. It is unlikely we will soon prevent large numbers of teens from drinking and using drugs. Yet, subtracting the approximately 20 million current drug users from the 110 million plus people who once used, almost 100 million Americans have left drugs behind. Perhaps it can be good for young people to learn that as they mature they can, and will, straighten out and fly right?

This is the opposite of the approach of nearly all school drug education programs. Here the logic is to troop in people who have ruined their lives by their drug use and drinking, as object lessons in the evils of sin. But there are reasons to believe that kids reject negative messages from figures like these, and that purely scare tactics don’t work. Research on effective drug resistance programs finds that the best ways to prevent substance abuse are for kids to develop skills, feel good about themselves, have positive peers, and look forward to their futures.

From this perspective, Mr. Obama’s message that he briefly stumbled but then righted himself to achieve success may be just what the doctor ordered.”

D.A.R.E. is not the only program out there. Alternative solutions abound–programs, for example, that focus on developing positive behaviors rather than avoiding negative behaviors–and are worth looking into. While I believe it’s important to educate our children about drugs and alcohol and their effects, preaching and fear-mongering are not the answers. Instead of saying what we don’t want our children to do, let’s give them some ideas and role-modeling about what we would like them to do.

by Gretchen Rubin

As part of my blog and forthcoming book, The Happiness Project, I examined all the parts of my life that made me “feel bad,” and that got me thinking about drinking. After my older daughter was born, alcohol started making me “feel bad.” I’ve never been a big drinker, but in college and afterward, I drank about the same as most people. I never loved drinking, but I enjoyed it modestly. When I was pregnant, though, I stopped drinking altogether.

The “First Splendid Truth” of my happiness project holds that to think about happiness, we must think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.

After my daughter was born, and I started having the occasional glass of wine or beer again, I had ZERO tolerance. A half a glass of wine hit me hard.

And not for the better.

Alcohol affects me in several ways. It never really makes me friendly and jolly, as it does many people. First, I become belligerent. I have a tendency to be argumentative anyway, a tendency much strengthened by going to law school, and alcohol makes me spoil for a fight. And that’s not a fun way to interact with people.
It also makes me less discreet. I say things that I wouldn’t ordinarily say; I’m less tactful; I’m more gossipy.
After these charming effects have worked on me for a while, I then become tremendously sleepy – uncontrollable yawning, pure misery.
These effects were more noticeable in situations when I wasn’t with close friends, but rather was with people I didn’t know well, or didn’t particularly like, or doing something that I didn’t particularly enjoy. Which, of course, were situations where it was all the more important that I be friendly and polite.

What made me focus on the “bad feelings” was the way I often felt the next day. I’d feel anxious and remorseful. “Was I really as obnoxious as I think?” I’d ask my husband, trying to get his reassurance that my bellicosity and my indiscretion were all in my mind.
And it wasn’t as though my bad feelings were outweighed by my enjoyment of alcohol. Fact was I didn’t really enjoy it that much. I can’t tell a good wine from a mediocre wine. I’ve never been able to drink hard liquor. And I’ve always begrudged alcohol the calories it contains, which I’d enjoy more in the form of dessert.
Finally, it hit me – this wasn’t a happy situation. Drinking was fun for other people, but it wasn’t fun for me. I’d rather skip the drink, and skip the remorse, and save the calories.
I’m not saying this solution would work for other people. I enjoy other people’s enjoyment of drinking (unless they talk about fine wine too much). I like the festiveness of martinis and champagne. I like the zestful enthusiasm some people have for drinking–while working on Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, I vicariously enjoyed Churchill’s love for liquor—though, actually, he drank less than most people think.
But it’s one of the most important “Secrets of Adulthood”—just because something is fun for someone else, doesn’t mean it’s fun for me—and vice versa.
I’m happier now that I drink less and behave better. I get home after an evening out, and I’m not eaten up with regret and worry about the way I acted. I feel fine, instead of being so tired that I can hardly take out my contacts. For me, it’s much more fun NOT to drink than to drink.
I could have solved my problem in the opposite way. If I’d started drinking more, my tolerance would have risen, and my behavior would probably have improved. For me, it was easier to skip the drinking than to increase the drinking.
I still have a little wine sometimes, or some champagne at a celebration, or a beer. I drink as much as I like—but I don’t like to drink much, now that I realize that it doesn’t agree with me.
Sometimes I regret the fact that I drink so little. Why am I so abstemious and cramped and cheerless? Other people are enjoying themselves so much.
But then I remember—it isn’t fun for me.
The striking fact about my deciding to stop drinking alcohol is that it took me so long to have the idea to do it. Why is it so hard to be myself or “Be Gretchen” as I call it on my happiness project? Why was it so hard for me to notice that I wasn’t enjoying myself? It can be very difficult to notice what seem to be very obvious facts about your very own self.

Gretchen Rubin is the author of the forthcoming book, The Happiness Project. Find out more about Gretchen at www.gretchenrubin.com