The joke goes like this: An American teenager walks into a Dutch bar and asks the server for a glass of beer. And then the server says,dead serious, “okay.”
Or at least that seemed like a joke to me when I first arrived in the Netherlands. On my second day here in the Netherlands my friends and I decided to get an afternoon beer from the local pub, considering the legal drinking age is 18 and we meet those qualifications. We were a bit giddy, which is expected considering none of us have ever been allowed to step into a bar and legally buy a drink. Walking up to the door, I almost felt like I was intruding on something; adulthood maybe.
Back in America, I am always told that I’m not ready to drink. Everyone under 21 is basically told that. We’re told that we haven’t matured enough yet to handle the responsibility of drinking. We’re told alcohol is a dangerous, powerful thing not to be played with and that until the law tell us we are ready to imbibe it, we could never use it responsibly.
With that being said, most young adults in America have consumed alcohol before turning the legal drinking age. The ambiguous, stern language used to describe alcohol only makes it more enticing and edgy. So it isn’t uncommon to find fifteen year olds stealing some of their parents beer and drinking it with friends, snickering and feeling rebellious. But that’s a best case scenario. When polling high school students in 2011, the Center for Disease Control found 30% of the sample to have engaged in binge drinking within the last 30 days.
To make sense of that, let’s use an analogy. You become a parent who allows no sweets in the house and you tell your child you will be very unhappy if he/she consumes sweets. Then you find out your child is hiding candy bars under the bed, binging on them and gaining weight. This is what you were trying to prevent in the first place! Well, if you tell someone that they can not have something but also that you will be unhappy if they do have it, that’s basically a recipe for sneaking and secrets.
This is what happens with alcohol in the U.S. Kids snatch liquor because it is off-limits and the education about it is stifled by a wagging finger. And when they suffer from the negative consequences, they feel uncomfortable telling their parents.In places like the Netherlands, however, the education on alcohol is provided through family and friends rather than in a classroom setting.
According to the Office of Student Affairs here at Kasteel Well, the dialogue on alcohol remains relatively open and begins very early on. That’s right. An open dialogue about alcohol between adults and children exists here. And while I am no longer a child, I do feel as though I learned something from the alcohol and drugs conversation OSA initiated. I learned that I had never had a conversation about these things at all. I had information sessions and rules and lectures. But a conversation where I felt I could contribute without fear of reprimand? That seemed foreign.
So I felt nervous opening the door to that bar. But I was able to walk inside with little hassle. I wasn’t carded. No one stared at me like I didn’t belong. I didn’t even have to dress up or put on makeup to appear older. I ordered one beer. The server said “Okay.” And after a casual, legal drink that didn’t make me feel nearly as rebellious as that beer I drank back home, I turned down the offer of another one and went back home.
Maybe that’s the joke. An American teenager is allowed into a bar and she orders just one drink.