<p>I did say potential sex partners. Not necessarily actual. Or not necessarily actual sex. Maybe more like “sexuality partners”. That OK with you? Kissing and cuddling only! And safe, really safe!</p>
<p>And only on Friday or Saturday night, not Thursday, not (heaven forbid!) Wednesday. After a nice meal off-campus at a clean but cheap restaurant, with lots of friends, and maybe a game of Monopoly or Risk. Like those parties at MIT?</p>
<p>I would approve of Monopoly, but definitely no Risk - too risky!!! ;)</p>
<p>Very good JHS, very good.</p>
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<p>A critical distinction! In college I had thousands of the former, but none of the latter.</p>
<p>Just throwing this out there… </p>
<p>Can you imagine if all of our kids were in a room and it became known that we were all having this conversation? Sexuality partners? My son would sooner curl up and die. But I agree hugely on the intensity of the party scene and is why some schools who take a more open door policy might be seen as more permissive, but in actuality are trying to avoid the danger imminent in pre-gaming or chugging shots as a way to garner a level of buzzedness to last throughout the evening.</p>
<p>Still… there are tons of parties where people get merely buzzed. And it’s the minority who are so blotto every night who think that '“everyone else is getting this drunk.” Not true. But my S has told me of a few instances where kids had no idea where their limit was and so they end up having to take care of them. That usually only happens once or maybe twice before they get with the program. You have to know that it’s OK to have a diet coke in the middle of a party and that red cups hold all kinds of liquid and just not liquor.</p>
<p>Good points all around. Cardinal Fang’s reference to “pre-game” bouts prompted this thought: drinking is most likely to become a problem when it is seen as a social activity in itself rather than an accompaniment to other social activities–just as a moderate amount of salt makes food more enjoyable, but nobody who didn’t want a hospital visit would eat salt as if it were itself food. </p>
<p>I get the sense that it’s the prevalence of this kind of drinking for drinking’s sake, more than the numbers of parties or numbers of students who drink, that really distinguishes the current college party scene from the one I knew. There was lots of drinking at my college (which neatly meets all of JHS’ criteria from earlier in the thread), and it was by no means confined to the weekends, but it was relatively uncommon for people to get staggering, slurring, puking drunk, for the reasons that Modadunn refers to. Drinking generally happened in contexts where getting seriously drunk would have negative social consequences, so we learned how not to do that. I worry that this kind of implicit moderating influence is not as prevalent as it used to be, and that the college social scene is more polarized into “substance free” and “beer pong” camps.</p>
<p>Modadunn, one successful drinking-reduction intervention is exactly to let a student know how much other students typically drink (not as much as he thinks, usually) and to publicize strategies for not drinking more than was planned (alternate alcoholic drinks with soda, put N rubber bands around your wrist and take one off for each alcoholic drink, have friends monitor each other’s consumption, etc.).</p>