How To Teach Children About Alcohol

I recently had this piece published in the HuffPost! This piece holds a very special place in my heart because it is my first official byline.

It also feels very genuine because 1) it is tyvm but also, 2) it talks about two things I care about very much - my sobriety and (even more) my children.

Apparently we do things very differently in our house and HuffPost let me write about it.

I quit drinking before my kids were old enough to remember me drinking. They’ve never seen me drunk or hungover. They won’t remember what it looked like for me to fail horribly at moderation, commit to sobriety (fail again), or learn to be sober. They only know me as their mother who doesn’t drink alcohol.

I quit drinking when I was 26, when my firstborn was 18 months old but before I got pregnant with my second child. There was no rock-bottom or arrest, no DUI or ruined relationship that signaled a need to quit. It was a personal choice I made, based on my own toxic relationship with alcohol that was only affecting me and my mental health.

When I quit drinking, my husband and I had to navigate some changes in our relationship. First of all, if I wasn’t drinking anymore (in the words of my daughter) what the whirl were we supposed to do? Was the end of my drinking the end of the one single thing we had in common? Did the beginning of my recovery signal the end of our marriage? Once we were able to confirm that it wasn’t and it didn’t (respectively), we had honest conversations around what I needed from him as a partner to feel secure and respected in my sobriety, as well as how we wanted to talk about alcohol and sobriety with our kids.

We acknowledge alcohol without villainizing it. My kids know they can always drink out of my water bottle or have a sip of my cran & seltzer at the pool, but their dad’s drink might not always be fair game. “Daddy’s drink has alcohol in it,” I tell them.

It’s our responsibility to explain to him why he can’t have any of his dad’s drink.We also talk about - openly and honestly - why there isn’t alcohol in my drink. “Mommy doesn’t drink anymore because it’s not good for her.”