Drinking has changed. And nowhere has it changed more than at my house.

My 22-year old drinks like a pharmaceutical sales rep testing the limits of her first expense account. She has never met an $18 Hugo Spritz she didn’t want another round of.

My 19-year-old drinks like an apprentice frat dude. A few weeks ago I walked into the kitchen where they were struggling to open a bottle of Stella Artois. I took a closer look. In their hand was a lemon zester.

As drinkers and as people, both kids are works in progress.

To be clear, alcohol is poison — but it’s a poison whose effects are generally pleasing, at least in the short run. And while there’s no way it enhances physical health, it may be good for the soul, as anyone who has ever dozed off in a hammock after a couple of glasses of Chablis will tell you.

Humans love to drink, and some of those humans may be your children. But watching them do it will test your patience, your capacity for self-censorship and your gag reflex. It will also make you examine your own relationship to alcohol and cause you to ask yourself uncomfortable questions like, “Was I ever that gross and stupid?” The answer is yes, of course you were.

We’d probably be smart, as a society, to take a more considered approach toward our ritualistic embrace of drinking at the onset of adulthood. But for now I’ll just say that my grown-ish kids, perhaps like your kids, drink. And they drink badly.

They drink rum with Diet Coke. They drink Peanut Butter whiskey and Corona Sunbrew Citrus Cerveza. They drink pickle brine concoctions they saw on TikTok. They drink colorized punch from giant jugs called Borgs at daytime parties they call “darties” or “dagers.” But that’s at college, where drinking is at its most berserk and repulsive.