Punishing Parents For Teen Drinking

November 08, 1993

Teenagers are under enough pressure from each other to drink, even when many of them are not inclined to do so. Worse is when parents, with a wink and nod, permit it in their homes, make no effort to stop it or, in some cases, encourage it.

The consequences can be disastrous, as reflected too often in headlines about teens dying in alcohol-related auto crashes. At that point, what seems essentially a private matter becomes a community issue.

Until recently, however, most communities-except for crackdowns on drunken driving-have left it to the schools to counsel students about the dangers of drinking. Or the students themselves have taken the initiative with establishment of chapters of such groups as Students Against Driving Drunk.

Now the focus is shifting to the homes and the parents themselves in an effort to regulate teen drinking. The issue is bubbling particularly in the northwest suburbs, shocked by a series of recent drunken-driving incidents in which teens died.

Several northwest suburbs-led by Mt. Prospect-have adopted so-called parental responsibility ordinances. Several more-Arlington Heights being the most recent example-are considering them.

In simplest terms, these ordinances hold parents responsible for allowing teenagers to drink in their homes and liable for any damage or injury that may occur as a result, with hefty fines or community service as punishment. If carefully written, they can be a welcome response, because parents ultimately must be held to account for the behavior of children.

Mt. Prospect's ordinance is one of the toughest, with a $1,000 fine for a parent who permits underage drinking in the home. In addition, there is the provision for liability for damage by a drunken driver, and authority for police to impound the family car if it is being driven by an underage driver with alcohol present.

In Arlington Heights, the proposed ordinance also would hold parents responsible even if they were not present, or claimed to have no knowledge of the activity-the assumption being that adults ought to take care about what happens on their premises.

Crafting such ordinances is a delicate proposition-to avoid making them too draconian, invading privacy or encouraging a police-state mentality under which the law comes calling just to see if someone is in violation.

In the best of them, there are exemptions, such as for family religious observances or cases where a child is under direct supervision of the parent-the oft-cited example of a teenager being permitted to have a glass of wine with the family dinner.

The real target, appropriately, is teen drinking parties with non-family members present, condoned by laissez faire parents who don't grasp the harm.

If that seems an unlikely occurrence, consider that in Wilmette-which has one of the oldest ordinances in the suburbs-police report prosecuting about 15 such cases per year. That is 15 too many.