Justin Warsht was joined us, so we talked about parenting with Justin when it comes in. I saw the article yesterday morning, and I actually we got a couple of talkbacks from people yesterday.
Just as an example. Here's one.
The study was about whether drinking as a teenager with permission from your parents.
They give you little bit of leeway or a lot of leeway, whatever it is.
But drinking before you're legally allowed to, does that have an impact on when you drink when you's legal as a young adult?
Hi, Gary, My parents would have a cocktail when my dad got home from work. He drank Martiniz. My mom drank Dubinet, which is a sweet sherry. We always got to taste it. We thought my dad's drink tasted like rocket fuel. My mom's drink was very sweet and we loved it. But I grew up alcohol just wasn't a big deal until I started partying in my twenties. Then it was more of a big deal. But now at this point in my life, I hardly drink it all. Maybe when I ought with friends.
So the study actually showed that the younger you start for one thing, the younger you start your first taste of alcoholic's. We had one person say seven, A couple of them said nine. The more common was somewhere around eleven, twelve, thirteen, yeah, twelve was yeah, and not a regular drink, but just the taste.
The sixth of the like the trying in the worship household. It's toddlerdom because of my Portuguese stepmom.
There you go, yes, there, as.
Soon as you can walk, you dip your pacifier in a vase of wine.
But they said they found an eighty percent increase of the sorry, eighty percent of the adolescents responded they had drunk alcohol with parental permission, and that those were more likely to drink more as young adults.
And the theory is like, and this is what I looked at it. These are surveys taken from two thousand and nine to twenty eighteen from people with children ages five to seventeen. And I wonder if there is like an generational aspect to this, because I feel like what she's talking about, like she sounds like she's at least close to our age. And my parents let me try anything I wanted. And my dad's whole philosophy was if you remove the taboo.
Then it would be less likely that I would drink in high school.
And this could just be circumstantial, but like, I didn't like I had one drink my entire the entire time I was in high school. I don't think I was actually drunk until I graduated high school. I was still under twenty one the first time I got drunk. But it wasn't like I don't know, I was always very responsive about It was never a thing that was like, oh,
this is exciting. So there's also an element to me that my mom always had a glass of wine as soon as she came home from work, and I always thought it was because she was Portuguese.
And that was the way she was. Maybe that makes me.
Racist, probably so Probably so I just saw it like, oh, but my dad never drank. My dad was probably drunk five times my entire childhood, and I never saw them any Like, at no point in my life did I ever see my dad's saw ever.
Never happened. So, but it's so, I don't know, it was never important to me.
I remember my parents not big drinkers, but they had a massive, at least my memory of it, a massive liquor cabinet right.
Cabinet is not the right word. A collection of liquor.
Yeah, it was always in the garage, and you know, he touched it, opened the garage door and it would be behind it. There was a set of shelves back there, and I remember looking at it and think of what is all that stuff for?
What? You don't drink it, what do you use it for? Maybe they were drinking it and I didn't know it.
My father used gin as a trap, like he would put because he got tired of me sneaking your mom, you're right. He got tired of me stealing his coke whenever he so he would lay out a coke and he would pour gin in it, like half gin, so I'd take a hit and lah, and when I was like less than five, like.
That, And that was just his way.
When with his grandkids he would put kayenn pepper on popcorn for the first few times, just so they wouldn't steal his popcorn.
My uncle used to put out his cigarettes in the old pepsi battas and that's all.
So that's at the turret for that and hee spit. If you take a sway of that.
I think there's also got to be an element kind of like what but even the talkback person said, like, I think is contradictor to this in that I think if you're parent like my siblings, my stepbrother and sister in law, they threw parties and they had their kids, had teenage friends and I'm talking at like sixteen years old.
They would have ragers at their house where everybody would spend the night and everybody was hammered, and both my dad and I were really afraid for them because if something really bad goes wrong and one of those other parents, supposedly all the parents knew.
I don't know, but if one of.
Those parents decides to file press charges, they could lose their house, they could lose their kids. Like There's a lot that could come from that, and I think they just everybody does it under the thing, Well, I just want them to be safe.
I did.
I went to one party like that, and I think it was a junior. I had to be a senior in high school, and the expectation was nobody leaves, nobody leaves until the morning. Yeah, and I there were probably ten of us, and the it was my girlfriend's mom. She bought a twelve pack of beer for like ten of us, and I remember thinking, well, this is not going to be fun. Yeah, and I had, I mean,
I'd never experienced it before. But even then I was like, this is not How are we going to decide who gets to drink the extra two beer?
Like?
It didn't make any sense. I cannot imagine doing that. I mean now, but freshman year in college, my daughter came home and she brought a bunch of friends with her roommates and things like that, and I said to them, hey, I don't mind. You guys want to hang out and have a crush, a couple of Seltzers or whatever. You guys want, whatever's cool amongst your group, but nobody leaves.
Nobody leaves this place. You can't get no windows and no doors.
But there were there were other times as well when it was just the four of us, my wife and I and then our son and daughter, and I would say, you want a glass of wine with dinner? And I mean this is late in their teen years, late in high school kind of thing, because I wanted them to know what it felt like, especially before my daughter went off and you know, got to go to the bars that in college town. You got to know what two drinks does to you. Yeah, compared to four drinks, compared
to six drinks. Now, I wasn't going to give her six drinks, but I just was going to get them to the point where they go, oh, this does change the way I feel.
I know what it feels like, it's being prepared, and the fact that like there's this where you feel it, and so maybe if you have one more drink after you start to feel it, there's more that's coming. Yeah, right, and you don't alay that, so you try again. There was one other thing I want to is it this right here? Even just actually increases rather than no, oh, we already covered it.
Never mind.
Thirty to forty percent of children under the age of thirteen try alcohol with parental permission in the United States.
Yeah, and that, I that's kind of a wide range.
But I think it just means hey, can I Yes, that's said, And here's the question, do you ask?
That's the other thing about it.
I don't remember asking for a taste of it until I was, you know, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, Oh.
My kids asked even yet.
But I remember my dad handing me a beer when I was nine or ten and saying, try that both.
Of my kids said can I try it?
And we've decided for maybe maybe this is how we're ruining and making our children alcoholics. Probably like we they said can I try, and we just said yes, like we would just give it to them. Especially cocktails at a restaurant. That's the one where I really break the law. Like I've had a couple of times where when they know they have to wait till the server leaves and then they can have a hit off a Dad's Old Fashion or a margarita or something, and to me, it
takes the taboo. My son has been to multiple parties. What's interesting too, the thing that they kids do now at parties. They drink, sure, but not as much they do CBD gummies. That's like the new thing. I think it's because it's easier to get CBD gummies than it is ones with THHC in it. And but that's what I'm hearing that a lot of the kids do at parties. They're not really drinking. Nobody smokes cigarettes anymore. That's like, what are you crazy? I told my kid, I'm like,
you inviuty some cigarettes so you could take to the party. Cool. He's like, you know, what That's the one thing you would buy that people would be mad at me. You'd be like, why what are you doing? If it was a vape man, they would be all over it. But everybody's vaping or they like the CBD gummies.
Today we've talked about the well, Shannon and I have talked about the Sean Diddy Comb's trial that's on right now. Cassie Ventura, his ex girlfriend, was the star witness. Cassie's mom actually testified as well about the abuse that she saw in her daughter and led to this question, Hey, good.
Morning, Gary, maybe this could be for you and justin today on the parenting episode. Okay, so Cassie Ventura's mom was in court and she showed pictures of her daughter, you know, lifting up her top and have bruises and blood and all kinds of damage on her body. And her mom was aware of it, but she didn't do anything to get her out of there from what I could tell, So, what kind of parent is that? That's not the kind of parent I am, And I don't think people listening want to be that type either.
Well, I don't know. If I I wouldn't go so far as to say she didn't do anything. We don't know.
I don't know what I was too. But she's also an adult. She's an adult. Mom can't force her out of a relationship. And mom was the one apparently who took the picture, so there was some amount of documentation that she knew needed to take place. I just think about Listen, there's a the whole thing about that, that trial or trials like that. If let's assume, for the purpose of argument, that he's guilty of sexually assaulting his ex girlfriend, which he's accused of, but let's just assume
that he that he's that it happened. As a father or as a parent, doesn't have to be a father, but as a parent of somebody who had gone through that, I would do everything I could to make sure that that guy never saw the light of day again, as uncomfortable as it would be, as potentially embarrassing as it
would be. I mean, the things that Cassie Ventura was testifying to are gut wrenching, gut wrenchingly embarrassing for her, and that she survived it and is willing to you put herself out there to put this guy away, says something about her character. I mean that she's a very
very strong person. We also mentioned that her husband was in the courtroom many times for many of the hours of her testimony, not all of it, but for many of the hours of it, which has got to be gut wrenching, and that her parent, her mom, knows these stories about what has gone on.
I don't.
I mean, there's a kind of a question that comes up. I would hate it if a parent was ever in that position. But I completely understand the idea that she's there, She's going to do everything she can to protect her girl, and.
I think like her. My two cents on that is that like Shannon makes fun of me and the comforter right, like when my son was had his previous girlfriend and then they would cuddle and while we were all watching a movie, and she's like, oh, things are happening under that comforter, and and even my brother in law gave me a hard time and said, I think they're doing more than kiss and and I just, deep down in my heart and soul, I know differently, But again, like
you're talking in a hypothetical, hypothetically, what if I'm wrong?
And I think that's that's how this stuff happens.
Is that we all as parents make assumptions about what our kids are feeling, especially as they get older. Once they get into those teenage years, you don't really have a lot of say. And it's hard because if you try to hold on too tight and keep them close to you, there's a little bit of like you hard, You're you're infringing on their development, like you're slowing it down,
you're stunting it. But also they pull away, like it makes them pull away from you more, so you have to kind of pick your shots, like it almost seems like they're in an orbit, you know what I mean. And then there's moments where they seem to want to talk to you, and that's when they're close in orbit. You're like, oh great, and you get in while you can and see how it goes.
From the elliptical orbit like a comet. Yes, yeah, like and you don't.
But and so all I'm saying is is that I think it's very easy on the outside to and I'm not judging this person. I think he's just saying, like, this might be interesting to talk about, and I agree. I think it's easy when we're all looking at the outside to say it's the mom's fault, like, why would she continue to allow this to happen? Because I think, like you said when we started, it's assuming that she was what we don't know, and what I'm like, this
is me doing the same kind of speculation. I was a big fan of Loveline when I was in like middle school, and it informed a lot about how I perceived relationships. And regardless of your upbringing, they what they identified to me as a young kid is that everybody has these kind of patterns, and what we don't know is that maybe this poor young lady has just had a pattern of being attracted to the wrong guy in her youth, like a lot of us do.
I was way into crazy chicks when I was younger, and now I just like a good old, boring lady. That's my wife, and she's awesome, I do. She's gonna love this right, so you know what I mean. I just don't want any drama in my life.
Well, and I think the one aspect of this specific case also is the power imbalance that existed between did he anyone else?
Anybody?
If he's threatening to again, One of the reasons that Kid Cutty was supposed to testify is Kid Cutty's car blew up in his driveway. Not too long after Sean did he Combs threatened to blow up his car in the driveway. Clearly, clearly this guy, or at least the impression was that this guy had the ability to take you out if he needed to. And that's, you know, one of the reasons why Mom, you could. There are other things you can do, but the power dynamic is not is not irrelevant in that case.
And if if like what if, Like I know, Mom, I don't know when Mom found out about this stuff. But I also think it's very easy, like in these situations where your kids are hurting, that's one of the scary things as a parent is that you have this perception and if the kid is just really good at covering it up and hiding it, then there's really no real way for you to know, because why would you know. I've had like my solution has been, if I have an inkling something isn't right, I get and I start
looking at their texts down on it. No, no, it's horrible, but I violate their privacy and I look at their text messages that they have with their friend. I look at their search history on their computer or on their phone, and I do it without them knowing it, so because I don't want them to know that I can look at that because I feel like then they're going to
learn how to hide it even better. And so I found out there was a time where my younger son was struggling, and I know that this wasn't the case. And I know people are listening who maybe have experienced this are going to go, you're wrong. But in this case, so far, everything's fine. But my son was googling like depression and anxiety and not suicidal, but definitely depression. And so when my wife, when I told her about that, she's like, oh, she's like starting to get nervous. I
was like, no, he's curious. He also has a friend group that a lot of the kids struggle with depression like at that time. So I said, if it's what you're hanging around, because we remember, I learn your social circle at his age thirteen to fifteen becomes more influential than the parents. So I think it goes back to the same thing. If she's traveling around with a group of people, people that are being this abusive tour, it's
hard for anybody to get out of it. Keep snooping right, stay connected, keep asking questions, and always just remind like, if you ever need anything, I'm here. As sappy after school specials as that sounds, I really think it makes a difference.
I really do such a fancy I am. I'm gonna go cry.
Thank you.
Gary Shannon will continue right after this