On sex, sex is healthy, but you need contraceptives.

Alcohol it's a drug, with a literal letal withdrawal (delirium tremens). That's right. But I can't agree with your prudeness on sex.

I wish the American people began behaving like Europeans where sex is not taken like a drug or something harmful at all since decades.

If any, pregnancies are a thing because of the lack of sex education and safe learning/practicing.

I'm not saying that this more conservative/cautious style of parenting has no value, or even that it is on net the wrong approach. I'm saying that it has costs of its own that are important to recognize and potentially devastating.

> The struggles of single parenthood for both the child-rearing parent and the children of divorce are very real and well-documented

The question isn't "does it suck to be a single parent or the child thereof". It's "is it worse than the alternative?" This is "people who see a doctor are more likely to die"-style reasoning that conflates a preexisting problem with an imperfect solution.

Kids need examples of loving and trusting relationships. That's how they learn how to build them themselves. They learn conflict resolution, compromise, and communication by observing their parents' relationship. And when that relationship is at best one of civil distance, a child can't learn what they need to learn. It's even worse when - as in my case - the kid is the channel through which a lot of the marital conflict plays out.

When my parents finally did split up (after I was already an adult), it was a relief to everyone involved. They're both better off. If they ever tried to get back together, I'm pretty sure I and my brothers and sisters would go slap them and tell them to not do the dumb thing.

> Keeping you away from illegal drugs meant you had the opportunity to get properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication instead of the too-common path of self-medicating with the recreational drug-du-jour, with much worse long-term consequences.

Yes, but you're leaving out the part where unmanaged mental illness almost killed me before I got on properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication. In almost every timeline but this one, it probably did kill me.

> You know the YOLO fad passed so quickly because kids realized the permanent scars left by “experimenting”, especially if there are no rich parents to pick up the pieces.

I take a different lesson from this. I think your point about "no rich parents to pick up the pieces" is one of the reasons that millennials and zoomers are struggling: we/they've grown up in a competitive world that doesn't allow them room for normal human error.

Making mistakes - or the safety to make them - is a critical part of growing as a person. It's an investment, the same way a company invests in R&D. It pays dividends. But it has short term costs you can't pay if you're always trying to make ends meet.

Yes, there are experiments you shouldn't perform because their costs outweigh their benefits, but most youthful indiscretions are not irreversibly damaging. One way to tell is that many of the richest and most powerful people around had fairly wild youths and tended to be fairly aggressively risk-taking.

I am someone who was raised with a very similar set of values. I was homeschooled, and often believed that "public-schooled" kids had a worse, more limited set of values. I was not allowed to use computers till I was in 11th grade, and dove into reading as an alternative. Very little screen time, but I ended up with a lot of issues that did not even begin manifesting until I was an adult. I would urge you to re-examine your beliefs around this topic. It is too easy to elide the issues by reframing them as "a bit of arrogance". Based on my own experience, listening to the people around me, they are not experiencing it as "a bit" of arrogance. It is too easy, almost intoxicatingly so, to believe that you are better than those struggling. As long as you frame your own struggles as unique, you will deprive yourself of both 1) commiseration and 2) knowledge on how to progress past. Rather than say "everybody who sought solutions to their issues had issues", ask the question "how many people that did have issues did not seek solutions".

> "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different" seems like a much healthier mindset.

Possibly. It's certainly a healthier place to arrive at, and it's where I'm at now as an adult. But I'm unsure if it's a strong enough position to get a kid through the intense peer pressures of middle and high school.

The difficulty that I see is that in order to truly hold that position as you describe it you have to have a really strong sense of self, which adolescents pretty much by definition don't have. Our brains aren't fully developed until 25, and in the developing stages our own sense of identity is pretty weak, and in those weak stages we all reach out for something larger than ourselves to hold on to.

The 'superiority' approach (which I put in air quotes because no one ever actually said "we're better", it was a very subtle thing) gives the adolescent a strong identity they can adopt while they're still molding one of their own—it gives them a tribe to which they already belong. You can work with them from there to have empathy for people in other tribes, but if you give them something thinner and less tribal right away, even if it's healthier in an adult, I would expect them to end up drawn to a tribe offered by their peers.

"You do you" doesn't work at some point. The drinking kids will exclude the one kid who refuses, even if only passively (sober surrounded by drunk). It really matters who the peers are. Fortunately, there are always ways to find new peers.

What about the harder ones that come up? A personal choice like that is easy, but

“I don’t drink when I know I’ll have to drive home because…”

It’s harder to empathize with those who do drink in that situation

It’s definitely not something that you should do on purpose

> "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different"

That was basically my high-horse libertarian mindset in high school when I saw other kids using cannabis-- I straight-up said to at least one, "I'm not going to do that, but I don't mind if you do." I thought I was being socially liberal and polite.

Spoiler alert, everyone else "wanted to do something different" and no longer cared about me after I respectfully removed myself from "the cool stuff" without condemning it. Today, I'm much more vocally negative towards cannabis users.