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.

Drinking in our home became a little more civilized a couple of Christmases ago, when my daughter got me a gift that keeps on giving — though to whom I sometimes wonder.

“Death & Co.: Modern Classic Cocktails” is an elegant 299-page manual of drink-mixing wisdom that will give you an excuse to buy a bottle of Fernet-Branca. It includes hundreds of recipes from Death & Co., the influential East Village bar I went to exactly once, loved immediately and never returned to, because I was usually home, doling out Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies and watching over bath time.

Now the child who ushered me into parenthood is standing at the kitchen counter while I’m making dinner. She is thirsty, and she has questions.

“What’s the difference between green chartreuse and yellow chartreuse?”

“What’s gin actually made out of?”

“Should we get some Beyoncé whiskey?”

Not so long ago, her questions were more along the lines of, “Did Grammy know the pilgrims?” or, “Is that umbrella a boy or a girl?”

To the newly legal, mixing drinks at home provides all the domestic satisfaction of cooking — only without all the, you know, cooking. The end result is a craft cocktail more sophisticated than anything you can afford outside your parents’ home.

The first one we made was a Death & Co. classic: a pink, semi-tart mezcal drink called Naked and Famous. Delicious.

“Should we whip up another batch?” my daughter asked.

My goal as a parent/drinker is to exhibit moderation, to help my children see the value in quality over quantity, to help them understand that one well-executed Scotch highball is worth a dozen White Claws, or that a lightly chilled Gamay can be a better option than a warm Burgundy, no matter the price.

I don’t always succeed. But having someone to share a drink with while you’re cooking feels like a just reward for travel soccer, palate expanders, FAFSA forms and parents’ weekends.

“Well done,” you might say, holding up a coupe glass of this or that. “Cheers.”

Drinking also gives you something new to bloviate about. You tell the kids that the success of a vodka brand is 99% advertising. You tell them they drink Aperol spritzes largely because of an expert marketing campaign that foisted this aperitif onto the world in the summer of 2019. You tell them about how “Sex and the City” helped kick off a cocktail renaissance that led to their sitting in the kitchen talking about amaro and how to balance citrus with salt.

“It’s science and art and culture,” you say, though you’re pretty sure that to them, it’s more about the alcohol.

I never drank with my parents. My father got sober before I entered kindergarten. My mother drank very little — a wine spritzer with dinner, maybe — mostly in solidarity with my sober father.

The tendency for alcoholism to be passed down like nearsightedness or curly hair was family doctrine, as my siblings and I were frequently reminded. Despite this dire prediction, or possibly because of it, none of us is an alcoholic.

But when I was the age my children are now, my parents did occasionally bear witness to the grim aftermaths of my drinking: the hangovers, the pilfered plastic Santa that appeared one night in the family room, even a call from jail.

For the most part, though, the unsightly, unkempt, unhinged half-adult I was back then remained a stranger to my parents. Young adulthood is messy business, and I’m glad my parents didn’t need to see too much of mine. So I try to give some space to the fledgling adults in my own household.

I don’t want to know about their DoorDash orders, their cannabis habits or the Netflix shows they watch. I mean, if there was something like a “Love Island” reunion in 1989, I would have spared my parents the knowledge that I was watching it. And if one could have summoned burritos and falafel platters or warm chocolate chip cookies to your door at 2 a.m., my mom and dad wouldn’t have known about it, because they lived a couple of states away.

As my kids set off on their drinking lives, I realize that mine is winding down. The goal of a drinking life, it seems to me, is to indulge a little less than you might want to. In exchange for your temperance — knowing when to say when — you get to wake up each morning somewhere other than rehab, thus earning the privilege of being able to drink again. I pray that my children will never struggle with anything so much that they have to give it up and live with longing for it for the rest of their lives.

Part of me thinks it might be cool to have a different kind of kid, like a straight-edger who says no to drugs and alcohol on principle. But that kid seems kind of annoying. Or maybe a kid who’s something of an amateur sommelier, who drinks to experience the complexities of the grape and blows their allowance on Croatian pét-nats. But that kid seems annoying and expensive. I have the kids that I have, and they’ll probably drink the way they’ll drink regardless of what I show them or tell them.

The other evening, my elder child came down to offer some “help” with the cooking. “Glass of wine?” she asked. Then she glanced at the Death & Co. book. “Or should we have a real drink?”

“Not, tonight, sweetie. I’m good.”