Dads who drink with their sons are a disgrace

Did your old man buy you your first beer? How old were you?

It is a little perturbing that it is gradually becoming a norm for underage teenage boys to be seen tagging along with their fathers to some dingy drinking den during happy hour. Downing a couple with your dad and his drinking buddies is the present day initiation into manhood.

Never mind that there are laws against that kind of thing. Gone are the days when the only way you could get a buzz on was to befriend your older cousins and hope they were feeling philanthropic enough to share their booze. The only way you could share a drink with your dad was when he forgot to lock the liquor cabinet and you took a hurried swig off his whisky bottle.

For a society that always claims to always follow the straight and narrow, our parenting techniques are a little unorthodox. It is not so much the drinking that I have a problem with. I completely fall in with the logic behind it. These adolescents are crafty so he is going to get a hold of alcohol one way or the other so it might as well be from you, right?

You will sleep better at night knowing he is by your side where there is adult supervision rather than getting hammered in some seedy nightclub where you can’t monitor his intake.

What doesn’t sit well with me, however, is the idea of letting your adolescent son get a front row seat to your drunken misdeeds. How a man behaves when having after lunch cocktails with his family is a far cry from the way he behaves when he is binge drinking with his boys at his ka-local.

You want your son to remember you as the honourable family man, not the leering drunk who was groping the barmaids and letting out random expletives at innocent bystanders.

He won’t think so highly of you when he hears you blabbering those mortifying supposed-to-be-private things for the whole pub to hear. What are you thinking when you are staring lustfully at anything in a skirt that walks by you in the presence of your son?

Your teenage son should never be your drinking buddy. I don’t care how open-minded you think you are, taking your son to the bar is just wide of the mark.

And you wonder why we are raising a generation of belligerent delinquents with psychological issues? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Let us set good examples for our sons.

@RoxanneKenya