Unless you watch your kid like a hawk then they'll be able to get cigarettes/drugs/alcohol as a teenager if they want to. A significant portion of my high scho

Unless you watch your kid like a hawk then they'll be able to get cigarettes/drugs/alcohol as a teenager if they want to. A significant portion of my high school population was drinking alcohol at parties and another (smaller) portion was smoking weed. My understanding from most of my friends and relatives is that their schools were the same. In my opinion kids are far better served by being enabled to safely explore new experiences and methods on how to deal with peer pressure when they don't want to. But really that's up to each parent to decide, they should know their kids best. 18 years old as a magical line for all human beings being equally capable to decide for themselves is a bit silly, if anything 18 year old males might be at the worst time for these experiences. If we wanted a good 'average' age to group everyone into that's based more on current understanding of biology then we'd probably want something more like 25.