College students who think their parents are accepting more of their drinking tend to drink more, a new study shows.
Researchers asked students about their drinking habits and how much they believed their parents were accepting of them drinking during their first four years of college. They found that the more students thought their parents approved, the more alcohol the students tended to drink.
The study, which appears in Addictive Behaviours, suggests that parents can still influence their children well into young adulthood, says Jennifer Maggs, professor of human development and family studies at Penn State.
“In the early years of college, parents can still play a role in providing positive feedback and encouragement for young adult students to make healthy lifestyle choices. One part of this can be supporting safe choices about drinking alcohol, and not reinforcing or making jokes about college being a crazy time when everyone takes risks without consequences.”
As the transition to adulthood — a phase of development that includes the college years — becomes longer, the role parents play in their children’s development during this time could also be increasing. Risky behaviour, including drug and alcohol use, also tends to peak during this time, the researchers say.
While other research has looked at how parent permissibility affects how much their children drink, most studies only looked at these factors at one point in time, often in the last year of high school or early in college. The researchers say that measuring how parent permissibility and drinking changed over time would give a better picture of how the two were related.
“We gathered data on how these attitudes change from the last year of high school through the third year of college. It’s interesting because a lot of parents aren’t super permissive of drinking during high school, which makes sense,” says first Brian Calhoun, a graduate student in human development and family studies.
“But then when students get to college, they are in a different environment with much less supervision, and they’re getting closer to the legal drinking age. It ended up being interesting to see how students’ perceptions of their parents’ attitudes about alcohol changed as students moved into and through college.”
The researchers used surveys from 687 Penn State students that asked about the students’ drinking habits and how much they believed their parents would approve of them drinking, gathering data at regular check points across four years of college.
The analysis showed that the more students believed their parents approved of them drinking, the more alcohol they tended to drink.
It’s possible that parents only become more permissive after learning their kids are already drinking regularly. Still, the study does offer evidence that parents’ attitudes toward drinking matter.
