Adult socializing, past and present

When I was growing up, my parents used to entertain a fair amount. Neither extravagantly nor of notable frequency but with some regularity. We lived overseas and were transferred from one country to another every few years. Entertaining was a means of enjoying oneself but it was, in such circumstances, an opportunity to quickly fit in to a new social scene, to discover and mix with the expatriate community in the new country.

At such cocktail parties, dinners, soirees, etc. there might be anything from half a dozen people to twenty or thirty across an evening. Unlike most settled social groups, not everyone knew everyone else. There was a lot of mixing and learning of one another.

As a consequence there was a great deal of learning by faux pas which we children delighted in. There was the evening in Sweden when the husband of a newly transferred American couple jocularly referred to his wife as the Gestapo, failing to realize that there were those among the European guests who had direct and unpleasant encounters with the Gestapo just twenty-five years before and for whom there could be no humor about the Gestapo.

There was the cocktail party in England when one English middle class couple was commenting to another couple how they enjoyed some new food chain that had recently come to Britain. An upper class Englishman joined the conversation at the tail end and picked up only the name of the chain and remarked how "frightful" they were.

There was the party where a couple of the guests partook enthusiastically of the libations to the embarrassment of their spouses.

What a petrie dish of social mixing and learning. I had never particularly considered how such adult engagements were such a rich means for children to observe and pick up on social norms.

It occurred to me how different it is, at least for me, today. I mix a lot for business but most social mixing is much more intimate than those parties of my parents' generation. We go out to dinner as couples. The people we spend time with socially are people we already know pretty well. We attend social events such as musical performances, reunions, professional events, etc. but they lack the randomness and the uncertainty of those social events of yore. And there are far fewer social missteps.

Is this just a personal thing, a product of my background overseas? A generational thing, perhaps? And what is lost and what is gained by the relative absence of such mixed-bag socializing? How do kids establish adult norms of behavior without seeing that behavior on display in its rich variety?