Rulebreakers and Secretive Drinking
Why the good kids end up with the problem.
There’s a narrative in our culture about the good kids. It goes like this. The straight-A, rule-following (or religiously devout) kids get to college or move out of the house and then all that repression comes out in a flash of rebellion.
The good kids are the ones that go wild once they no longer have to follow the rules. The idea is that we (I count myself among them) secretly desired to be breaking all the rules the whole time. We just needed an outlet to do it.
Another way people think of this narrative is that strict parenting leads to rebellion once the kid moves away, and this pent up rebellion explodes all at once — causing problematic use of drugs (movies usually add in sex as well).
This is the narrative, and maybe there’s some truth to it. But I think people get the cause wrong. I was a good kid who didn’t drink until I was an adult. In fact, I waited until it was legal just to keep following the rules.
I didn’t go wild, but I still developed a problem.
The reason is pretty clear in my head. It was actually because I didn’t rebel. I wasn’t a rulebreaker. I tried to follow the rules publicly. I didn’t want people to know I drank more than them. And this led to secrecy.
