Researcher Decries Parental Permissiveness on Drinking

From Join Together Online

A Penn State researcher says that parents who let teens drink alcohol may be setting their kids up for binge drinking in college, but the study by Caitlin Abar of the school’s Prevention Research and Methodology Center makes no distinction between parents who simply let kids drink some wine during meals and those whose permissiveness extends to drinking outside the home.

Science Daily reported June 11 that Abar surveyed 300 college freshmen and correlated their alcohol use to the drinking rules set down by their parents. Abar found that students whose parents never allowed them to drink were less likely to report heavy drinking in college.

On the other hand, “the greater number of drinks that a parent had set as a limit for the teens, the more often they drank and got drunk in college,” said Abar.

Abar said the research argues in favor of “zero tolerance” for teen drinking and against the theory that parental restrictions on drinking casts alcohol as attractive “forbidden fruit” and leads to greater temptation to drink in college. Whether or not parents themselves drank had little impact on college binge drinking, Abar added.

Thirty-one states allow parents to legally serve alcohol to children under age 21.

The research was presented at the recent annual meeting of the Society for Prevention Research and slated to be published in the journal Addictive Behaviors.

This article summarizes an external report or press release on research published in a scientific journal. When available, links to the sources are provided above.

COMMENTS ON THIS ARTICLE:
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Posted by Hughey on 25 Jun 09 11:08 AM EDT

Posted by Bill Godshall on 25 Jun 09 01:05 PM EDT

Science by press release isn’t science, but propoganda. Its impossible to objectively analyze a study unless its published first and made accessible to interested parties. But the stated conclusion of the researchers (that parental allowance of any youth drinking is associated with higher rates of binge drinking at college) cannot be objectively concluded by a study that fails to differentiate between parents who teach and implement responsible drinking policies for their children and parents who allow/encourage binge drinking by their children. Also, it is quite possible that children of zero tolerance parents are less likely to engage in any drinking at college (than children of parents who tolerate drinking). So perhaps this study only confirmed the obvious, that college students who drink any alcohol are more likely to engage in binge drinking than college students who don’t drink any alcohol. Although anecdotal, virtually all of the hundreds of college students I knew who engaged in binge drinking (including myself) had parents who forbid drinking by their children.