Perhaps this should be How to Survive my teenagers party!
Having just survived a teenagers party at home, I wanted to share some tips with other parents:
- Absolutely crucial. Confirm the number to be invited before your teenager invites everyone they know. Allow for an additional 10 people to be added just before the party. Your child will be inundated with texts, facebook messages to add friends or boyfriends or girlfriends of people coming.
- Confirm the start and end times. We had 7pm to 11.30pm
- Prepare your home. Try to keep them to the backroom and/or just outside. Don’t allow them to roam through your house. Remove valuables and breakables and pictures etc. from the walls. Their dancing technique is pretty wild. Remove all alcohol from your fridge and pantry etc.
- Make a guest list including their home phone number and a parents name and mobile. School lists are good for this information. Your child will say this is embarrassing etc. to get phone numbers, but make it the rule or the party’s cancelled.
- I didn’t know alot of people, especially the boys coming, so I decided to ring all parents and give them the details of start and finish times and address etc. and reinforced the no alcohol rule. Every single parent was extremely appreciative of this phone call. For once they knew what was going on and it actually made me feel more at ease having made contact.
- Register your party with the local police.
- Decide on security. We didn’t hire security, but had an adult at the front gate, one at the back fence for over the fence gatecrashers, one on the front door for list checking and I checked bags for alcohol.
- On the night check off the names as they come in, and stamp their wrists or put on a bracelet or something to identify that they have been checked at the door. Believe it or not, kids will come and use other people’s names to get in, so by having them all tell you their home phone number upon entry, confirms they are the right person and you can also guage their breath for alcohol. I then put all bags and back packs into a locked bedroom and if they wanted to take it with them, I had to look through it. All bags were happily surrendered and given to us for safe keeping. I do think most of them were happy to have someone keeping an eye on their bags which kept their phones, cameras etc. safe.
- Plan on feeding only a quarter of them – they don’t eat. We had cans of drink, and water and oj.
- Alcohol – they will smuggle it in, they’re very sneaky. Even with all your check points in place, some alcohol will be smuggled in, but if you can reduce it, it reduces problems.
BUT HERE’S A NEW ONE FOR THE PARENTS: Vodka and orange juice already mixed in clip lock bags were smuggled in flat under their clothing. I guess it’s a good advertisement that clip lock bags don’t leak. You can only hope they’re just as clever at their school work!!!
It was alot of work trying to stay 10 steps ahead of these sneaky teenagers, but they had a great time and more importantly from their point of view, great photos for facebook. Now if anyone can tell us how to get rid of facebook, we’ll be happy.
