Mention “parties” in the same breath as “teenagers” at this table and you will hear groans. You will hear about feral teenagers on Saturday night rampages. You will see eyes roll and heads fall into hands.
Teenage parties are a well-known battleground. The police, parents, schools, the alcohol industry and young people are at loggerheads. Hosting a “gathering” has never been trickier. Social media, alcohol and mistakes make for a toxic mix.
Ask the police how to host a party successfully; they will propose the following tips as though they were blindingly obvious:
Register the party online; make sure your child has access to a phone; check there is adult supervision at the party; understand it is illegal to serve alcohol to minors; organise your child’s trip home; have your child carry identification; know where the party is going to be held; negotiate pick up times and organise designated drivers in advance.
But throw into the mix a dose of reality via uncooperative teenagers, peer pressure and dodgy parenting and it is no wonder teenage parties turn nasty.
Consider the following debacles cited by the lunching ladies:
Jenny and Paul’s Will requested an 18th birthday party. They agreed he could ask his closest male friends. Will didn’t know many girls, so his parents agreed his friends could invite “a few extra” girls. They called the police at 9pm when it was clear from the hundreds of kids on the footpath outside that the invitation went viral. Several were throwing bottles and threatening the neighbours. Jenny and Paul blamed the teenage girls for the disturbance.
Doug and Sue, both lawyers, encouraged their daughter Bella to have a 16th birthday. Bella was reluctant at first, but warmed to the idea after her friends become enthusiastic. She told her parents she had invited sixty friends. By 10pm the house was awash with alcohol and 100 drunken teenagers. Jenny and Doug said they served no alcohol, but they “allowed a bit” to be brought in. The neighbours phoned the police and the party was closed down. There was a stabbing down the road not long after the party finished. One of the guests was seriously injured.
Helen and Mark* hosted a 16th birthday party for their daughter Kate. Sara, the mother of one of Kate’s friends phoned and asked whether alcohol would be present at the party. Helen scoffed at Sara, insinuating her concern was unwarranted. At 11pm when Sara arrived to pick up her daughter, she saw several kids passed out in the gutter in front of the house. Helen and Mark had been banned from the party room, so they hadn’t checked on the teenagers and had only noticed the drunkenness at the end of the night. They assumed the alcohol was brought in by people they had never met.
Most parents can relate a scary tale about parties that went wrong because parents were absent. Parents were present in all the above mentioned stories. They were the biggest risk factor.
Ask teenagers what makes a successful party and they will say lots of friends, a great atmosphere, music and dancing. They might be honest and say alcohol makes it. They will invariably say overprotective parents and police worry too much about drinking and violence.
After many phone calls and emails, local mother Belinda offered her recent experience hosting a "kind of successful" 16th birthday for her twin daughters. Kate and Alex.
The girls were allowed to invite 25 friends each. Alcohol was banned and Belinda, her husband Rob and two other couples were present. Belinda hired a jute box and the girls choose the music. They wrote to the neighbours and agreed the party would finish at 11pm.
When Belinda and Rob asked for the names of invited guests, the girls were vague. The list was a work in progress and this caused arguments in the lead up to the party. Belinda and Rob told the girls that if anyone left the party early, they would not be allowed back inside the house.
Despite the girls becoming increasingly tetchy, Belinda insisted on emailing details to parents a week beforehand. On the night of the party, several uninvited people turned up. Rob was on the door to enforce the ‘no invite-no admission’ policy, and he sent them away. There were tears and pleading from the birthday girls and inside the house, a bedroom door slammed once or twice.
The evening progressed slowly for the parents, but in a noisy adrenaline-fuelled rush for the teenagers. There were more tense moments when it came time for the guests to leave. Few kids had firm transport plans, so Belinda ordered and prepaid several taxis. She was alarmed by the number of parents who were unavailable to pick up their children. One parent turned up an hour late, after his child had left in a taxi.
Belinda and Rob were exhausted and relieved when the party was over. They were surprised and disappointed to find empty vodka bottles strewn across the back lawn, and flabbergasted by the number of cigarette butts shoved into the geranium pots near the back door.
Type ‘teenage parties’ into a search engine and multiple sites pop up, warning about the evils of social networking, bad parenting and toxic substances. Happy party stories are rare. Belinda, Rob and their girls mastered the elusive: relative harmony amid intergenerational struggles, achieved by employing United Nations-strength weapons of negotiation, conciliation and respect.
Would this family do it again? The girls are pushing for an 18th,
but Belinda and Rob have told them the next house party will be their 21st.
And the advice from the lunching ladies as they grabbed their bags and headed for school pickup?
“Never, ever have a teenage party!”
* Names have been changed.
No comments:
Post a Comment