Research & Resources

Does parental influence decrease as their children progress through college?

Alcohol use prevention research has shown that parents are very influential on their children’s drinking behavior, even after they leave to go to college. However, less is known about how that influence changes as children progress through their college years. Researchers studied samples at several public universities to examine the relationship between parental permissiveness and drinking and how they changed over time. They found that the more permissive the parents were, the more likely the students were to drink in college and that those students experienced more consequences. The article, An examination of parental permissiveness of alcohol use and monitoring, and their association with emerging adult drinking outcomes across college was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and published in February in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
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