The Responsible Parent

Parents who try to teach responsible drinking by letting their teenagers have alcohol at home may be well intentioned, but they may also be wrong, according to a new study in the January issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

In a study of 428 Dutch families, researchers found that the more teenagers were allowed to drink at home, the more they drank outside of home as well. The findings put into question the theory that parents who drink with their teenage children will teach them how to drink responsibly.

“The idea is generally based on common sense,” says Dr. Haske van der Vorst, lead researcher at Radboud University in the Netherlands. “For example, the thinking is that if parents show good behavior -- here, modest drinking -- then the child will copy it. Another assumption is that parents can control their child's drinking by drinking with the child.”

But the current findings suggest that is not the case. The researchers found that, in general, the more teens drank at home, the more they tended to drink elsewhere.

Based on this and earlier studies, van der Vorst says, “I would advise parents to prohibit their child from drinking, in any setting or on any occasion.”

“If parents want to reduce the risk that their child will become a heavy drinker or problem drinker in adolescence,” van der Vorst says, “they should try to postpone the age at which their child starts drinking.”