Parental drinking and parenting practices influence adolescent ...

Adolescence is a critical time of development on many different levels, but especially concerning the initiation and escalation of alcohol use. For example, the proportion of American adolescents who regularly drink alcohol roughly doubles during secondary-school years. New findings show that parental drinking both directly influences adolescent drinking, as well as indirectly through adolescent perceptions of parenting, especially monitoring and discipline received.

Results are published in the February issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

'We wanted to, first, examine the extent of the relationship between the drinking behaviours of parents and those of their adolescent offspring at 14 and 17.5 years of age,' said Shawn J. Latendresse, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioural Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University, and corresponding author for the study.

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