Jennifer O’Connell: Raising teenagers, it’s not your job to be their friend

As I’m in the final, halcyon days before teenagers stomp into my life, I only recently encountered the concept of “predrinking”.

Bear with me if you've been predrinking since peach schnapps and Britvic was the zenith of sophistication. To predrink – or, if you're really stuck for time, to "prink" – is the act of skulling a ½ litre of cheap spirits before you go out. Usually done by those going "out out", instead of merely "out", it's considered a smart economic investment and a non-negotiable part of preparation like, say, putting on sunscreen before the beach.

Similar concepts existed when I was a reckless teenager. We had various iterations of hedge drinking. “Hedge” was not a metaphor. There was nothing glamourous about hedge drinking. The education on offer in these hedge schools of the 1990s was the opportunity to explore the true cost of wine that retailed for a fiver, or whether lining your stomach with milk before tackling a flagon of cider worked. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.)

Prinking almost always happens in someone's home, usually with full parental knowledge

To be clear, we didn’t actually want to be sitting behind a hedge. If we looked underage – a dead cert for the under-18s in the days before fake tan, contouring, GHDs and Instabrows – there wasn’t anywhere else you could get together for a social drink. There was certainly no question of drinking in someone’s house. So the hedge it was. We usually lasted a Budweiser or three before we ran out of booze, needed the loo, got cold, the guards turned up and threatened to take our addresses, or we sloped off to someone’s house to eat pizza and watch the Lost Boys on video.

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Prinking, if I’ve got it right, is an entirely different phenomenon. Prinking almost always happens in someone’s home, usually with full parental knowledge, approval, wifi and access to their debit cards.

The whole point of prinking is to get as drunk as possible: maximum intoxication at minimum price outlay. But these days, at least some prinkers seem to have done away with the minimum price outlay part, and focus on simply maximum intoxication.

A friend told me how she had recently attended an 18th birthday party. Not wanting to be boring, middle-aged killjoys, the parents had stocked up on vast quantities of medium quality white wine, red wine, and beer. Afterwards, they counted up the damage. The red wine had not been touched. Only half a bottle of white wine was gone. Barely a dent had been made in the beer supply.

I was simultaneously impressed and horrified. “What’s wrong with teenagers today? Wait. Don’t tell me. They were all too busy taking selfies.”

“Yes,” she said, pulling out her phone to show me a group shot in which they were all standing alone, pouting into their screens, and ignoring one another. “But that wasn’t it.”

They did drink. They drank a lot. They drank their parents' efforts under the hedge. They just didn't drink the booze supplied by the host. For free. They didn't touch the canapes either. Instead, all their calorific and alcoholic needs were met through the medium of €24 Tesco Imperial vodka and Jagermeister, some of it provided by obliging parents. They didn't want to waste time getting slowly tipsy on wine or beer. Maximum intoxication at minimum speed was the goal.

Several of them achieved it. By 9pm, a number were in no fit state to be going anywhere else. The parents who had supplied the cut-price spirits can’t have been that surprised when they got the call.

It wasn’t just that party. A friend of mine in the pub business says the average spend on student nights in one venue has fallen from €55 in 2010 to around €7 today. That’s arguably a good thing for those of us not in the licensed business – but it’s not because the students en masse have stopped drinking. Instead, they’re prinking, and getting so drunk so early in the night that they’re already in an advanced state of inebriation – and probably on a fast track to cirrhosis – before they ever get to the venue.

I have mixed feelings about whether it’s ever really possible to teach your kids to “drink responsibly”, other than by not drinking in front of them. But it’s very easy to teach them to drink irresponsibly. Encouraging the belief that a night out socialising among other humans is best approached with a bellyful of cut-price vodka is about as dysfunctional as it gets.

Here’s the thing. When it comes to the raising of teenagers, it’s not your job to be their friend. It is your job to be a boring, middle-aged killjoy. If they don’t hate you somewhere between 30 and 89 per cent of the time from the ages of 14 to 17, they’re going to hate you later, when they actually mean it.

So when your 16-year-old asks if you wouldn’t mind throwing a bottle of Jagermeister in with the weekly shop, the correct response is to laugh in their face. They’ll love you for it one day, most likely when they get to 30 and still have a functioning liver.

joconnell@irishtimes.com