Research & Resources

In a recent paper, researchers tried to understand the effects of parents allowing their children to drink alcohol before they are 21 years old. They analyzed the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), a large dataset that collected information on health behaviors from multiple generations to examine how a parent allowing their 14-year-old child to drink alcohol would affect their heavy drinking patterns later on. They found that adolescents whose parents allowed them to drink had higher odds of heavy drinking, more rapidly progressed from first drink to heavy drinking, and engaged in heavy drinking more frequently. These results held even after controlling for other factors related to adolescent alcohol use and parental permissiveness. The paper “Parents Allowing Drinking Is Associated With Adolescents’ Heavy Alcohol Use” was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. It was published in Alcohol Clinical and Experimental Research.