>>IMO, that's because it's not really a conflict. Young people will always need to spend some time socializing with their peers, and at a certain age it may involve some partly anti-social stuff.
>
>True, maybe my experiences have rubbed me the wrong way. For example, seeing many of my peers sitting in the back seat of a cop car just because they had a beer or two might have had an impact on how I view the situation.

Yup, I'm getting an impression that USA is ruled mostly by puritans, or that those who are not don't have the will to be loud enough, so you have laws such as you have. It's ridiculous, IMO, to allow driving at age 16, and wearing a gun (regardless of age), to have the age of consent at, what, 18? - and yet to have such strict laws about drinking. Alcohol is a worldwide problem, true, but arresting kids for it is way overboard IMO, specially when it takes months to only scratch the surface of the Enron class of scandals, and when everybody knows that guys who steal millions get much better treatment than kids who had two beers.

Maybe this is the legacy of prohibition - the bills are passed as reactions to events past - but sometimes it seems that the cure was worse than the disease. Prohibition has spawned organized crime, which is still here after 80 years, and hasn't done anything efficient to prevent alcoholism. Just made the middlemen richer.

Back to our original subject - any parent grumbling too much risks pushing the kid against him/herself (dang, why don't you have the impersonal reversive pronoun in English?); grumbling too little risks losing the kid's respect and ability to fight authority. I find the latter fairly important - if we don't prove to be a good honing stone for these skills, when and where will our kids learn them?