Posted on August 16, 2010

Parents often struggle with how to handle adolescent drinking. Some use stricter rules, hoping they won’t push their children to drink in secret. Others use a more relaxed method, hoping that by supporting their children in drinking in supervised settings that they will help them to avoid binge drinking.

In the 2009 Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s report on the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 24 percent of students participated in heavy drinking. A recent study explored the different approaches to parenting styles and how they impact adolescents’ drinking behaviors (Bahr & Hoffmann, 2010).

The study compared four types of parenting behaviors: authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent, and neglectful, to see how the affected drinking behaviors in a large sample size of adolescents was affected by parenting style. The researchers used a multistage probability sample to choose 4,983 students that were enrolled in grades 6-12 to complete the survey.

The survey included questions about drinking and students’ perceptions of their parents’ discipline styles. The drinking questions asked the students about their alcohol use in the last 30 days, identifying behaviors as no use, light use (less than five drinks in one sitting), or heavy use (five or more drinks in one sitting).

Parenting styles identified on a support and control continuum. High support, high control displayed an authoritative style. A combination of low support, high control exhibited authoritarian parenting, while high support, low control was identified as indulgent. Low support, low control parenting was labeled neglectful parenting.

The researchers also measured religiosity in each student, using frequency and importance to determine its role; and peer alcohol use by asking how many out of four best friends drank.

The study used structural equation modeling to estimate how the past 30 days of alcohol use were affected by parenting style, religiosity, and peer alcohol use.

The results of the study show that adolescents with parents who used an authoritative style of parenting were less likely to drink heavily than the students from other types of parenting households. They were also less likely to have close friends who used alcohol.

The researchers were surprised to discover that there was no effect on light drinking based on a student having authoritative parents. However, there was a difference in this measurement seen between authoritative parenting and neglectful parenting.

The study’s results may be limited by the use of a cross-sectional design that does not examine the cause-and-effect relationship between the variables. In addition, the information was all gathered by using self-report.

The results of the study highlight the importance of parental involvement with students to help them deter drinking and also lessen the impact that drinking peers may have on their decisions.