I moved to Ireland when I was 15. I drank alcohol while underage, but it made me more responsible.

08.11.2023 - 14:41 / insider.com

I moved to Ireland when I was 15 due to my father's temporary assignment abroad with an insurance company. It was my mom, my dad, and me.

We had toured secondary schools for me to go to, which were all private. I came from a "picture-perfect" high school in Illinois, and the schools couldn't be more different. The biggest difference wasn't the physical elements — having to wear uniforms, being in old classrooms in buildings older than the US itself, and adjusting to the more serious atmosphere — but the way adults treated high-school students there versus the way adults treated high-school students in America.

The way Irish students treated themselves and each other and how adults treated them showed a mentality of "teenagers are not children."

A friend's parent explained their own expectation of maturity and understanding from their young adults as wanting to prepare them for adulthood properly without hiding and sheltering ideas that may interfere with their young adults' innocence. The Irish parent seems to see their role as one of readying their children for the adult world, not protecting them from it.

Irish parents trust their young adults in secondary school and allow them to explore in ways American parents might never permit their young adults to.

Irish parents don't shelter their children, and they encourage exploring more adult-oriented parts of life, such as drinking, in safe environments. My friends' parents were aware their children would drink — part of it is inarguably embedded in Irish culture — but they would rather them do it with parental supervision, in the safety of their own home, where the parents can keep an eye on what they're consuming and how others are reacting. It's significantly safer than the typical American young-adult experience of not being allowed to drink as a teenager and then going off to a university with no supervision to try all the things you've witnessed while growing up.

I'll never forget my first Irish house party. There was underage drinking, but the parents were home. They didn't intervene, but they were there in case of emergencies.

Nothing got out of hand; people looked after the kids and no one got hurt. I felt safe, even in the presence of alcohol, something my upbringing had raised me to be wary of. There was a vast difference between the kids at this Irish house party, and the group of freshmen at my Illinois high school who broke into their parent's liquor cabinet to steal booze — my old school even got involved.

When my parents first discovered I had been drinking at parties, they grounded me, whereas some of my Irish friends had been drinking with their parents at family gatherings since they were 14. Only in my last year of high school did my