Just Say No

You may think you can ease your adolescents into drinking by serving them controlled portions at home—but you could be setting them up to abuse alcohol into young adulthood and beyond.

“There’s such a misconception about this issue,” says Amelia Arria, associate professor of behavioral and community health and director of the Center on Young Adult Health and Development at the School of Public Health. There’s “no research evidence that providing alcohol to underage children somehow translates into teaching them to drink responsibly.”

Arria and her colleagues reviewed 22 studies that examined the relationship between parental approaches and adolescent drinking outcomes. They looked at the consequences of parents serving their own children, as well as providing alcohol for underage parties at their homes. Their findings were published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs in July.

They found that adolescents whose parents give them alcohol face a higher risk of binge drinking and alcohol-related problems like blackouts, symptoms of alcohol dependence, and drinking and driving.

Students who were heavy drinkers (more than six drinks on days that they drank) when they entered college had a 19 percent probability of developing alcohol dependence, compared to just 2 percent of non-drinkers, according to longitudinal data from an ongoing study Arria started ten years ago.

One reason may be that adolescents whose parents give them alcohol are getting the message that their parents approve of underage drinking, Arria says, leading them to be comfortable consuming increasing amounts of alcohol when their parents are no longer around to supervise.

Another may be physiological. Since the brain continues to develop until age 25, “the brain pathways for risk and reward are being constructed,” she says. “When you introduce alcohol as a reward during that critical time window, it changes the brain in such a way that may set up a lifetime of vulnerability to addictive substances.”

The best policy for parents, Arria says, is to set zero tolerance standards at home, which means conveying that they expect their child to refrain from consuming alcohol before they turn 21. Even if they’re not 100 percent successful, the message and consistency of zero tolerance are important.

According to the Maryland College Alcohol Survey, 83 percent of low-risk college drinkers (those who abstained for at least the last year) had zero-tolerance policies at home compared to 38 percent of high-risk drinkers (those who engaged in binge-drinking five or more times in the last month).

For parents of children heading off to college this fall, it’s important to talk about the legal, health and academic risks of drinking. Research shows that binge drinking is associated with skipping class and, in the long term, can “hijack rewarding academic opportunities,” Arria says.

Parents should encourage their students to set goals and stick to them, and not let drinking get in the way.

“It’s a competitive world out there,” she says. “They need keep their eyes on the ball.”