And how that changes when we become parents. 

By Patrick Coleman, Parenting Editor, Fatherly

Americans drink. More than half of adults do so with great regularity. In times of stress they drink more — alcohol sales increased by 26 percent in the first half of 2020 year according to the Neilson Group. Why? Because booze relaxes us. It’s a reward.

Jim Harrison, the famous author of Legends of the Fall and equally famous drinker once said, “If you spend your days behind a shovel or in an office grinding your mental teeth, alcohol is the rite of passage to your time off, the rest of your life that takes place when not getting your living, the evenings and weekends spent in the constitutionally entitled pursuit of happiness.” He also said, in a knowing contradiction, “life is so short you want to remember all of it, bad and good.”

Adults drink. For better and worse. And many of those adults happen to be parents who certainly aren’t immune from knocking back more in the era of COVID. A recent survey conducted by researchers from the University of Maryland and John Hopkins University found that parents with kids who were distance learning due to COVID were more stressed than normal and drinking 7 more drinks per week than their pre-COVID average.